 You gave a really interesting farewell speech in the House that I want to play a little bit of because it lays out some of what you were alluding to earlier about your view of the current state of our government. And I also think it raises what I consider to be one of the most important political issues of our time. So let's roll that excerpt from your 2022 farewell address to Congress. I rise today for the last time as a member of the 117th Congress. I do not seek to dwell on the circumstances of my departure, although it does bring to mind a few lines from Yates' second coming. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Perhaps it takes a cataclysm like World War I to capture the naked and malevolent cynicism of our politics. Yates also well captured the harrowing consequence of elite ineptitude that precipitated the slaughter of tens of millions. As fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. I read and reread those words while flying out of Hamid Karzai International Airport last August during the shameful end to 20 years of America's war in Afghanistan. What I saw on the ground during that waking nightmare exemplified some of the best of the American men and women in uniform, but it also reflected the haplessness and incompetency of American policymaking. The failure of our war in Afghanistan, a failure abetted by decades of Congress' lax oversight of the President and his Department of Defense. To solve this, I pushed for Congress to take back its war powers, to take back that constitutional responsibility, but even when it comes to Congress asserting its own prerogative, this body has shown itself unwilling to do its job. The current budget negotiations taking place on the other side of the rotunda also show a Congress unwilling to confront the very basic task of passing a budget on time. The last time we had a budget passed before the fiscal year started, I was in second grade. When Congress is incapable of solving problems of its own making, how can the American people have any faith that we can tackle the problems arising from the broader world? What hope do we have of out-competing China, of winning this coming century, if we can't even get out of a mess of our own making? We need the best to regain their convictions. To set an example of what clear-eyed leadership looks like both at home and abroad, we need to hold the worst to account and reprise the moral resolve that has led us through dark times in this country many, many times before. Too many have sacrificed too much for us to squander the opportunity before us, the opportunity to rise to the challenge of this moment, to set aside petty squabbles, the opportunity to build on the promise of limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty, the promise that underpins the American dream. How do you feel rewatching it? Do you feel like it all rings totally true today? Do you wish you'd hit any different points? Those were the moments where I was still aggressively campaigning and petitioning and spending a lot of time on the Senate side to get the Afghan Adjustment Act passed to try to get that into the NDAA or into that omnibus that was being worked on. And, you know, because that was a deeply personal kind of issue. And it was something that we were so close to being able to get. Ironically enough, and it got zero attention is that Afghan Adjustment Act, which would offer some stability and kind of certainty for the folks that had supported US forces in Afghanistan that we had evacuated, some of whom were still in the process of kind of evacuating and resettling to give them, you know, some permanence as opposed to the kind of temporary status many of them are on. And it's an unholy mess of a kind of bureaucratic conundrum they're in. And so that that was, I would say, my kind of main focus. You know, I don't know. And I hadn't even kind of thought about it. My campaign launch video hit a lot of those same themes, you know, just by, you know, I probably should have done some of my research and look back out, you know, those words, but, you know, things I clearly and deeply believe and think are, you know, still very much ring true. You know, I think if you don't have, you know, again, a good balance of power between the executive and the legislative branch, I think. Well, if I can just kind of step back, there's a lot of folks who think our chaos in our system right now is is a product of political chaos that because of how chaotic our politics are, you know, our government can't function. And that's what I thought going in today. I'm a big believer it gets the causality backwards that the more our government screws up, that the more, you know, the American people feel the consequences of neft policymaking, the more they reach for, you know, replacements for alternatives, you know, for explanations for why that individual when they got into office couldn't do the things they promised to be able to do. So, you know, you this guy didn't get the job done. So we're going to vote him out and send in somebody who's even more emphatic that they'll do it. And so much of the challenge, though, is the power has been stripped from many of those offices in Congress, you know, either Congress has let the executive take it, has given it to the executive or the executive is just, you know, taking that over. And so the basic kind of mechanical function of our government is broken. And that's where then, you know, you have that promotion of extreme, you know, in ever more chaotic politics, if there were fewer things the government was screwing up, you know, there'd always be people who were dissatisfied, but, you know, it would find less purchase. You wouldn't be fertilizing the same ground, you know, that those kind of seeds of mistrust, you know, can be planted in. And so I'm I think it's a it's a complicated thing. So you start talking about legislative supremacy and notions of subsidiarity and, you know, generic generic concepts. They're it's challenging to get that done, not impossible, but challenging to get it done in Washington, because so many there's every legislator will look at a policy and want need to see a very concrete upside because the downside is always theoretically exponential. You know, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Or if it is broke, you try not to fix it because no matter what you do, if you are fingerprints on it, you know, you you might be held to blame even if your efforts were all well and good and pure of heart. And that's when I, you know, it's easy to throw up your hands at that challenge. But to me, the art of government is trying to say, OK, politics is the art of the possible, you know, how do you find ways in which you can make, you know, a concrete lasting effort. It's a lot easier to do that if you're getting at some of the structure's underpending responses to issues than if you're just getting distracted by the issues at hand. You need to deal with and react to those issues. But you also have to be able to get out of that reactive mindset to be able to put forward, you know, a vision and also backwards plan, you know, how do you get from that vision? How do you get to that vision from where we are? You know, what is that pathway? Could you talk about that the structural issue as it pertains to foreign policy and the balance of powers? Because I know it's something you have been very focused on. That the something you raised there is an attempt to make Congress exercise its war powers and sort of rebalance between legislative and executive branches, which I think is extremely important when we're talking about the federal government. What are you hoping to accomplish on that front if you make it back to DC? Yeah, I think you need I approach a lot of these with sort of a policy agnostic, but, you know, process obsessive mindset. You know, if you think about war powers, I think oftentimes it's, you know, within the context of why we need to end this war. And that's why we need to repeal it. I mentioned the example of the war on terror, you know, 2001 thereafter, you know, had that authorization for use of military force that was passed shortly after 9 11, had that had a sunset every two years or four years or six years. Probably six is too high, but, you know, two years, three years, five years, something within that band, it's not necessarily saying that nothing would happen after that five year period. You know, it's saying that there would have to be far more frequent engagement by the Department of Defense, you know, by the, you know, national security community with Congress and Congress would because they have to cast a vote, you know, senators and representatives would have to be casting an affirmative vote either in favor of continuing or in opposition to continuing military efforts. They would be asking better questions. They would feel more of a sense of ownership. They would have to articulate and defend. They would, but in the process of asking those more difficult questions, the Department of Defense would also have to sharpen its pencils. Our policymakers on the national security side would have to more firmly articulate and align their efforts with what they were saying. Right. This notion that if we're just going to be hands off, everything will be fine. I think is, is become so detrimental and so ruinous because you have sort of a defense policy establishment that essentially looks at Congress as a body to avoid. I mean, there were a couple of times where I would be getting a classified briefing and I would say, oh my God, thank God we're finally getting, you know, a briefing on issue X. I've been waiting for a while and then I turn around and realize, you know, it's a word of, it's kind of like, you know, you realize they're trying to sell you a time share, you know, like it was, you know, we need your support on, you know, this bill or this authorization. And so we're telling you how big of a problem is going on in this region, not because you should be aware, not because it should be informing, you know, how you're approaching something, but because we're going to have to ask you for something. And so if the executive had to ask Congress for more, the amount of transparency would be higher, the feeling of responsibility among members would be higher. And, you know, I think it, things would just function better, again, with that lead to less or more. I think there's there's arguments to be made in kind of either direction. But if we look at the strikes that, you know, the president has just conducted recently against the Houthis, against Iranian back groups in Iraq and Syria, you know, both are picking from a variety of different, you know, authorizations coming from the Constitution, whether it's Article 2, kind of defense powers of the president in a self-defense capacity or, you know, Article 1 authorities from authorizations through use of military force that were passed in 2001 or 2002. Again, it just is doing an end run. It is failing to engage. And I think it allows the American people to check out because their representatives are checked out. And that type of lack of transparency, of lack of attention, of lack of concern, I think ultimately only dooms those projects to failure, because then when people start to do pay attention after something that happens, you know, they catch themselves up on 20 years and in the span of a two minute TikTok video. And that's probably not going to be conveying an accurate view. I mean, I could, I could, I could tell from that speech that your experience serving overseas, you brought a certain, you had a, you're almost like personally insulted by the way that these wars have been conducted over the past couple of decades. Like what is it that this sort of, I don't know, half hazard or just like rubber stamping type approach, why is that particularly insulting and damaging to the people who serve in the military? It just shows a disregard. I think, you know, by way of background, I was in Iraq as a soldier doing intelligence operations in, you know, 2020, sorry, 2010 and 2011. And then I was in Afghanistan as an NGO conflict analyst for the humanitarian aid community. So, you know, no uniform, no weapons, neutral living on the economy from 2013 to 2015. And, you know, I think in both of those conflicts we found ourselves with allies of convenience that just looked at the US as an entity to exploit. We didn't necessarily have any specific strategy or objective or goal we were going towards. Or if we did, it would change frequently enough that, you know, what we were doing was never aligned towards any specific intent, you know, that notion of a self-licking ice cream cone. And the reality is that the entire time you're there, I mean, there's a risk that you're undertaking. American service members are dying. You know, again, I don't reflexively say, oh, you got to bring everyone home or there's no scenario in which we should be in some of those areas. But our policy makers sure as hell need to articulate why those risks are being undertaken to what end. You know, what are those terms and how often would those be reevaluated? Because I think the majority of the war on terror or at least our kind of post-911 moment has been, you know, this linear sense of engagement where it's like, okay, we're either gonna maybe some sanctions, then we're gonna have some airstrikes, maybe a special forces raid, maybe in the Marines that go in to be, you know, temporary, or maybe we're gonna hold and build with kind of large conventional forces. And it's like, okay, well, to what end? What's our goal? Yeah. And have our helped achieve whatever that goal is, but you can't even measure if they've been effective if you don't have a consistent goal or you keep changing it. And again, lives hang in the balance. Civilian lives are lost, military service members lives are lost, and the taxpayer is footing the bill for all of that. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week, so subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens, or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcatcher. See you next week.