 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds on reason. Today we're joined by Congressman Thomas Massey, House Representative for Kentucky's 4th Congressional District. He's a consistent opponent of government deficit spending, foreign aid, and overreaching federal mandates, all of which have occasionally left him as the sole no vote on bills with otherwise overwhelming support in D.C., which we'll talk about today. Thank you for speaking with reason, Congressman Massey. Hey, thanks for having me on, Zach. When you first, the first thing I want to ask you about is before we get to your kind of sole dissent that you've been, the sole dissenter that you've been many times before, I want to talk about something that's really pressing, that's unfolding in D.C. right now, which is a vote on the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act. And as part of that, the reauthorization of something called Section 702, which essentially allows the government to surveil communications between American citizens and foreign targets without a warrant. And it seems like now after some resistance, a clean reauthorization of that is unlikely to happen. They're attaching it to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is kind of like the defense budget for the year. And they're trying to slip a more temporary extension into that. Could you just tell us what is at stake for Americans with this issue? Right. So we're not trying to eliminate the FISA 702 program. It was established to allow our intelligence agencies to spy on foreigners without a warrant. In order to qualify to be spied on without a warrant, you have to be outside of the country and you have to be not an American citizen. If you're inside the country or if you're an American citizen outside of the country, you can't be spied on by this program. Sounds great, right? But we've got 250,000 people on that list that we're collecting information on. And in the process of collecting that information, if you talk to a business person in France, for instance, your emails and stuff may get caught up in this data collection. Well, what they've been doing is they go into this giant ball of data and they put in your name. They can put in Zach's name and search it without a warrant, without reasonable suspicion or probable cause or any of those sort of thresholds, legal thresholds, not to investigate suspects but to create suspects. Let's say that you and Liz are at a protest and they develop some nexus. They say, well, we think these protesters were inspired by Russia. Okay, well, we're just going to run all the protesters' names through this database. Now, even though the Intel community doesn't concede that they need a warrant for this, they've admitted that they violated their own protocols hundreds of thousands of times when they search for US persons data in this haystack. They say, well, it was created legally so we don't need a warrant to go search it. There are two proposals to reauthorize this program. By the way, the only chance you ever get to reform these programs is when they expire. So it's important that they do expire occasionally. And this one expires in January. And in the Judiciary Committee, which Jim Jordan chairs and on which I serve, we've marked up a bill that would require them to get a warrant. It would create criminal penalties for people in the executive branch who abuse the program, because there's never any culpability or blowback for anybody that's abused this program. But this would create that. So we've created this reform bill. And then the Intel committee has created a bill, which is less than ideal. It doesn't have a warrant requirement. It doesn't have many of the reporting requirements back to Congress that the Judiciary Bill has. And in fact, it expands their ability to collect information to, for instance, if you had free Wi-Fi at a cafe, that service provider would be treated like Google or Verizon now, and they would have to create a direct pipeline to the Intel agencies for any of the communications that go through that. So you've got two proposals out there and we're running out of time. So what Speaker Johnson has proposed and some senators have proposed, oh, let's just keep the old program in place for a little bit longer. Your basic congressional kicking the can down the road exercise. That's going to be passing the Senate probably today unless Mike Lee and Rand Paul can stop it. Then it comes to the House probably tomorrow. Now, an interesting thing here is I serve on the Rules Committee and Chip Roy and Ralph Norman do as well. And we told the powers to be we're not going to, we can't go along with this. So they couldn't pass a rule to combine the FISA program with the NDAA. That's how they're going to try and get it through attached to must pass legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act. Well, we said, no, this shall not pass. The Rules Committee. So they're going to try and do this on suspension, which and there's a House rule that says if you want to suspend all of our regular rules and expedite something, you need a two thirds vote of the House. So this is going to be interesting to see if they can get effectively 290 people to vote for it. Yeah, yeah, it is interesting because if you think back to when a lot of Americans were first awakened to this with the Snowden revelations about a decade ago, there were some sort of, you know, lonely dissenters to just rubber stamping this stuff yourself among them. Some of the other people you mentioned, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, some people on the Democratic side of the aisle. It does seem as if now there's more resistance. I mean, I assume some of that has to do with the way FISA was used against the Trump administration. Do you feel like there's the political tides have shifted somewhat to the advantage of people who care about privacy and government surveillance? Yeah, the tides haven't just shifted. The stars have aligned. Okay, we've never had a chairman of either the Intel Committee or the Judiciary Committee who made reforming this program one of their priorities. And so with Jim Jordan, we're very lucky to have him as the chairman of this committee. And this is one of his signature agendas is to get this reform, because we have seen abuses that have been used against the president, President Trump. So a lot of conservatives have woken up to the fact that this program is being used against them. You have liberals who are upset about the program. Obviously, the FBI is using this against Black Lives Matter as well. And we know that to be the case. So you do have this coalition of the left and the right. It used to be a coalition of maybe a dozen people, right? Like it was me and Justin Amash and Zoell Offgren and Tulsi Gabbard, maybe, who were concerned about this. And we used to come together and we would offer amendments to try to fix this in the funding bills. We would try to defund some of this stuff, which is a really blunt instrument. It's a lot easier to write a legislation that affects the laws than it is to just defund something. And they would pat us on the head and say, well, you know, we appreciate the sentiment, but this isn't the time or place to do what you're doing. And you shouldn't be mucking around with the funding. But now is the time and place. The program is expiring. We've got a chairman who's sympathetic to the cause and a lot of people, a lot more people on the left and the right who are, you know, this reported out of the Judiciary Committee 35 to 2. There were only two dissenters and it was on the Democrat side to the Judiciary FISA reform bill. And I want to ask about foreign aid. So this week Zelensky came to Washington and made his pitch for why the United States in his eyes ought to be funding Ukraine's war against, you know, a horrible invasion by Vladimir Putin. There's also obviously a, you know, terrible foreign policy situation in the Middle East right now between Israel and Hamas. You have called, you know, funding Ukraine and funding Zelensky, I believe it was economically illiterate and morally deficient. Yes. Make the case for why you oppose this form of funding. Well, the economic illiteracy is in reference to a letter that the White House sent to the House of Representatives last week. And in two or three of the paragraphs of the letter, they espoused the virtues of spending money with the military industrial complex and sending that to Ukraine as a job creation program that it would reinvigorate our military industrial complex. Instead of, I guess, MIC is out of date. It's now the DIB, the Defense Industrial Basis. I guess they want their dibs. They're going to get their dibs on our tax money. But they do. They call it the Defense Industrial Basis in the letter and they've made the economic argument. This is the broken window fallacy for libertarians who are watching this. And so you've got to be economically illiterate. You've got to believe in the broken window fallacy to think this will be economic stimulus for the United States. Meanwhile, the moral deficiency comes from some of the senators who have said that this war is a great deal for America because all we have to do is supply the weapons. And Ukraine supplies the soldiers and that we're grinding down the Russian army and we're degrading their capacity to do this elsewhere or to commit war against us. The problem with that is the numbers of people who are dying. Zelensky allegedly told the senators that he's raising the draft age to 40, like the ceiling on it. And that admitted that they are running out of soldiers either through attrition on the battlefield or from people who've defected and left the country. You would think if this were a war about the existence of Ukraine and protecting a democracy and such a fine government that people would sign up would volunteer to fight for the country. But the reality is, hundreds of thousands of them, ones who had the means and the money, got out of the country. Some are dying trying to escape over mountains and through rivers to get out of the country. And far too many have died on the battlefield. We can keep supplying them with weapons. We can keep depleting our treasure, but they're going to run out of fighting aged males pretty soon. I want to push back on that a little bit. Do you take that as an indictment of Ukraine's democratic system or more of a sense of, you know, not that I want to advocate for military conscription, but a sense of leaving the country because they see it as a war in which they will get creamed, a war in which it's, you know, just totally unwinnable. Like, how do you look at that situation? And more broadly, how should libertarians look at parallels or lack thereof between the U.S.'s involvement in funding Ukraine and the U.S. funding Israel? Well, to your first question, I think it's both. They lived in a country, they know that bribery and corruption is part of the culture, and the current government isn't even immune to that. And so if you're fighting for your country, that's one thing, but fighting for the government that's in charge of your country is another thing. And so I believe that's part of it. Obviously self-preservation is going to be part of it as well. You can't blame anybody for that. So I think it's a little bit of both in the reason that they're leaving or not wanting to fight. And then ultimately, look at where this is all going to end up. Like when it's over, there's going to have to be some negotiated peace settlement. Nobody, I think, believes that Crimea is going to go back to Ukraine. And although that was one of the stated objectives early on, and probably Zelensky still stating that as sort of a fairy tale. And then the eastern regions that Russia had some control over before the war are probably going to be in control of Russia after this. So why spend all the lives when the lines are going to be where they were when it started? I mean, I think it's just realism is a third factor in that. Now, what was your second question? Well, yeah, let me pick up on Liz's second point there, which is about Israel, because you've been kind of on the lonely and certainly on the Republican side of several votes pertaining to Israel. This is but one example House Resolution 771, which is entitled standing with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists. And what I'm displaying here is a tweet from APAC, which is the Israel lobby, saying that you, Thomas Massey are siding with the squad with AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilan Omar and opposing supporting Israel opposing condemning Hamas. You also were the sole vote against kind of a symbolic recognition of Israel and saying that anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism equates to anti-Semitism. Could you just explain your stance on Israel where you're coming from and what some of these you think some of these critics might be missing about your position? Sure. That was the first of 19 votes. Today we're going to take our 19th virtue signal vote here in Congress. But I guess I got off on the wrong foot early and have been voting consistently ever since. The title of that bill is wonderful. I have no disagreement with the title of that bill, but there are four or five pages that go after that title. Well, it's a resolution. The first objection I have to it was there was an inside of that an open-ended pledge of military support for Israel. We never declare wars anymore. The administration just kind of goes and does it and Congress keeps funding it, but they find the imprimatur for their activity right there in these resolutions. So the open-ended guarantee of support for that war that's contained in the text of that bill, but not the title, could have implied boots on the ground. And that may be the only vote we get to take in Congress on whether we're going to do that or not. So number one, I don't support that notion. Number two, they were in that resolution, they mentioned Iran. In the very first resolution, they're already trying to expand the war and incorporate as much of the Middle East as they can. There's some people that just can't wait to attack Iran, and they want to use this as the nexus to get there. So that was in the resolution, a condemnation of Iran. I think we should be trying to constrain the conflict, not to expand it in the first resolution of support that we passed. There was a part of that resolution, wanted stronger sanctions on Iran, and I don't support sanctions. Never voted to sanction a sovereign country in the 11 years that I've been in Congress. I think it leads to war. Sanctions actually create crimes only for U.S. citizens, because we're not going to go put somebody in jail in another country who trades with Iran. What we're proposing to do when we pass a sanction is to make a federal law that would result in the imprisonment of a U.S. citizen who trades with Iran. And it hurts the people who are in the country. I think it actually edges us closer to war instead of getting us out of war. So there were even more reasons to vote against that. Even though I support Israel and I condemned Hamas, I did that on my own. I put out a statement. I support Israel's right to defend itself, and I condemn these attacks. But that wasn't enough. One that you took even more heat for was this one where you were the only vote against it. And it was what I guess you would describe as a virtue signal bill where essentially it's the House reaffirming the state of Israel's right to exist and to recognizing that denying Israel's right to exist is a form of anti-Semitism. Where are you coming from on these sorts of bills that aren't even really directly tied to any sort of military aid or anything like that? Well, I recognize Israel's right to exist. I have to preface all of this stuff with that because people would imply from a vote that I don't. But when they passed that, I said, you're basically saying that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. And people argued with me that that wasn't Zionism, you know, that those words weren't a proxy for Zionism. Well, what's interesting is the next week they passed almost the same resolution and they replaced Israel's right to exist with Zionism. So maybe I'm just giving them clues for how to write their bills more directly because the next resolution said that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. And there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who disagree with that statement. In fact, Gerald Nadler, who's the most senior member of Congress who's Jewish, went to the floor and gave a five-minute speech, which is a long speech in the House of Representatives. This isn't the Senate. But he gave a five-minute speech on why that's untrue to say that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Now, there are a lot of people who are anti-Semitic, who are also against the state of Israel, but you can't equate the two. And I think these 19 votes after today are sort of a, it's part of the war effort for Israel to make it hard for anybody in the United States to criticize what they're doing. Every two or three days here in Congress, you have, we're taking these votes that a lot of what's in the resolution is just obvious and doesn't need to be stated. It's kind of like Black Lives Matter. You have to say Black Lives Matter. Now they're making, they're doing the equivalent with Israel now. Israel matters. And so I agree that Israel matters, but we don't have to take all these votes and some of them are going into campuses and trying to limit free speech by withholding federal money. If you allow anti, things that are considered anti-Semitic, by the way, let's take a second just to talk about that word. I've been called anti-Semitic for merely not supporting the money that goes to Israel. APAC ran an ad, they spent $90,000 in my district running ads, implying that I was anti-Semitic. And then in a tweet said that I was anti-Semitic for not spending, not voting for the $14.3 billion to go to Israel. Even though I've not voted for foreign aid to go to anywhere, ever. Do people buy that talking point of APACs? The ad was not effective. When they run an ad in my district that said Thomas Massie was the lone Republican to vote against this resolution. And people are like, back in my district, I have a history of being the only vote that was a no vote, like on the CARES Act, and explaining why it's a bad vote. And then a couple years later, they find out, wow, why didn't everybody vote the way he did? So I've developed some trust with my constituents on those lone votes. I mean, Chuck Schumer has accused you of being anti-Semitic. He's blasted you on Twitter. Here's the tweet. He said, Representative Massie, you're a sitting member of Congress. This is anti-Semitic, disgusting, dangerous, and exactly the type of thing I was talking about in my Senate address. Take this down. And what he's referring to is the Drake meme where he's saying no to American patriotism, yes to Zionism, Congress these days. I mean, what was your reaction to having someone as prominent as Chuck Schumer accusing you of anti-Semitism? Well, we ratioed him on that pretty soundly. I quote, tweeted him and said, if only you cared about half as much about our border as you care about my tweets. And he's got like over 10,000 comments now on his tweet to me. I mean, it's just simply not true, by the way. And the replies to him, you'll find somebody who pointed out that of all 535 members of Congress, this cycle, he received more money from pro-Israel lobby according to OpenSecrets.org than any other member of Congress. So it just, it rings hollow when he says that. And he's even in disagreement with Gerald Nadler, for instance, on equating anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. And I'll admit, memes are not the most precise way to convey a point, but they can be effective. And that meme, it doesn't imply that there's nothing in that meme that implies those two things are mutually exclusive. And that wasn't my intent. I was just pointing out that you could, it's okay in Congress to be patriotic for Israel, but you can't be patriotic for America. That's considered nationalism, which is American nationalism is a dirty word. And I know it's loaded and there are a lot of people that have attached themselves to it. But if you take it in the generic sense, it's pride in your country. So I use the word patriotism. Pride in America is looked down upon right now. It's out of fashion, but pride in Israel is something we have to vote on two or three times a week now in Congress. It's almost like we're in an era where political memes have sort of replaced old forms of political satire. Like we used to have staff cartoonists at every single major print publication in the United States. And now it's kind of interesting because this form has been sort of democratized. Like anybody can create a Drake Hotline Bling meme, including sitting members of Congress. But I do think there's something interesting about like, you know, memes are obviously not the weightiest possible form of conducting this discourse with Chuck Schumer. But they are sort of how we do things nowadays. I think there's like something to be, to be mold on reflected on there about like what that says about our political culture. I think it's maybe a good thing. Yeah. And listen, I think most congressmen, if they got any controversy would throw their staff under the bus and say the staff created that meme. The reality is I like just did put meme generator in a search engine, found the, you know, the blank meme I wanted and put those words in there. Wait, you made the meme? I made the meme. I didn't tax that meme. I didn't steal it. I created it myself and my staff, in fact, tried to talk me out of it. Because they value their jobs more than I value mine, I think. This is the revolution we needed. Yes, exactly. And you mentioned, you know, you, you, you have this reputation now in your own district and nationally as the guy who's willing to make the meme or, you know, do make take the unpopular vote. And I think that one of the prime examples of that is back in the depths of COVID March 2020. Everyone was pushing for this $2.2 trillion COVID relief bill, including the president of the United States. And it was representative Thomas Massey who was saying, if we're going to have a $2 million, $2 trillion vote here, let's follow the Constitution and have everyone come back to DC and actually do it in person. And for that, going back to Twitter, the, or, you know, now X, the kind of locus of political discourse, President Trump's response to that was look like, looks like a third rate grandstander named representative Thomas Massey, a congressman from unfortunately a truly great state Kentucky wants to vote against the new Save Our Workers bill in Congress. He just wants the publicity. He can't stop it. He goes on to say that, you know, the Republicans should win the House, but they should kick out Thomas Massey. I mean, what was that like having the eye of Sauron on you for insisting on an in-person vote in March 2020? Oh, well, I'll have to write a book someday, but that those tweets happened about 60 seconds after a phone call ended between me and President Trump, where he basically burned my ear off screaming at me for probably three minutes and said he was coming at me. He was going to take me down. And that's a sobering proposition when you're you've got a primary election eight weeks away. You've been trying to keep the president out of your race. The person running against you says you don't support the president enough. And the president had 95% approval rating among the primary voters who were going to vote in my election. But I just stood strong. I said, listen, if if truckers and nurses and grocery store workers are showing up for work, then Congress should show up for work too. And that was, I think, an unassailable message because ultimately I was just trying to get people on record. The reason I was trying to get people on record is I knew this was one of the worst votes in history and nobody was going to be accountable for it. And so I'm, you know, here we are three years later, every bad thing that I said would happen as a result of doing that has happened. And even my colleagues here in Congress, a lot of them admit to me that they were wrong about that. They won't say it too loudly unless anybody hear it. And I got 81% in that primary, you know, with Trump screaming at me and tweeting at me and whatnot. By the way, the reporters came up to me as I walked out of the chamber that day and said your own president just called you a third-rate grandstand. What do you have to say? And I said I was deeply insulted. I'm at least second-rate. And they didn't have to come back to that. But be careful. If you ask the ex-chatbot or whatever, you know, the AI that Elon Musk has on ex, if you ask it to roast me, it will say that I, you know, like a washed up high school quarterback. I like to talk about that one event back on March 27th, 2020 too much. And, you know, it's kind of funny that it roasts me for bringing that up. So you, if ex is listening, if Grock is listening, I wanted to know that you, Zach brought it up, not me. Yes. How much COVID policy remorse is there among your colleagues in Congress? Not enough, not nearly enough. There should be, the policy isn't just the spending, the vaccine mandates, the shutting down of our economy, the compulsory masking, the way people were treated like cattle. There should be far more remorse. But frankly, that's a reflection of the voters as well. If you poll this, most people have moved on. Even a year ago, most people have moved, had moved on. And it wasn't in the top five issues of what people care about in any congressional district. You can't campaign on, well, I tried to save you during COVID. I mean, look at Ron DeSantis, that was part of his signature issue. And by being the, you know, different governors responded differently, but he most famously opposed a lot of this COVID nonsense after it became obvious what we were dealing with. And he rode that wave and he was polling better than Trump, but I think people have moved on and they've got other issues to think about now. And that's, you know, people have just moved on and so have my colleagues and I think it's really unfortunate. And I wish that I had been able to get that recorded vote that day. We'd have a lot more people who wouldn't be back here in Congress perpetrating bad ideas like FISA. So I have one last question and then we'll wrap up because I know you have other stuff to get to. You're a busy man. But on that topic, you know, one of the things that the CARES Act and that the pandemic stimulus spending led to, you know, at least as far as I can tell is inflation, right? Like that's something that's on American voters minds. Do you see any signs and also you were elected during sort of the era of the Tea Party, you know, reining in government spending, a sense of, well, we care about our fiscal health. And so as a result, we can't just have the money printer constantly print money forevermore. We have to be prudent because the bill always comes to do. Do you think that that message has any hopes of having any sort of revival in the coming years, especially given the runaway inflation that we've seen? Or do you think it's just a totally lost cause and we're all screwed? Let me assign a 95% probability to that last proposition. But I'm here in the 5% chance that we can save it. And in the 30% chance that if it all goes to hell in a handbasket, I can still be here and have some credibility in putting it back together. I think what's starting to curb the appetite for spending and bring some realism into the discussion is the only thing that was ever going to curb our appetite for spending. And that is our creditors are starting to balk. The rates at which the government can borrow money now aren't what we want them to be. When we go out to do an auction or a sale for treasuries or bonds, what we're finding is the appetite isn't there even at 4.5%. To get guaranteed 4.5% return on your money from the government backed by the U.S. military, that's not enough to loan that money to the government. They want 5%. That's an indicator that when the private sector and the other countries who the sovereign funds who usually have the appetite for our debt, when they're losing their appetite, that's a sign that things are going south. And not to promote it too much because Grock roasts me for this too, but I wear this debt clock that I built in Congress to remind people of it. And one side effect of me wearing this is I've noticed that because it by the way it logs onto treasuries website once a day gets the debt to the penny. It would do it more frequently, but they only publish it once a day. As a consequence of wearing this and looking at it every day, one thing I've noticed is the rate at which the debt is increasing is going up. So like for the math nerds, that's the second derivative. And today the debt per second is set average over the last year is $78,000 a second. It's just, I don't think people realize it feels like we're going over Niagara Falls right now to me. The rate at these bad things happening is increasing now. Oh, good. We got a graph. I love to see. Yeah, this is just the debt to GDP ratio and historical terms. So you can see that, you know, exceeded the high point of World War Two. And we're, you know, after World War Two, they actually cut spending. So I don't know how this turns around at this point. But with that debt clock pin, though, is like, is that something you made? Like, where did you get that? You made that? And Zach and I buy them. Well, I'm not going to, Liz, I refuse to monetize the debt. But, but yeah, that's a dad joke that only I can say in these circumstances. But there is a company, I gave them the IP and they are, I don't want to advertise it here because I'm in my office. But if you look for it, you can find a place to get this. I gave the code away and they're making these and bringing shame everywhere to. I am, I am giving them away to other members of Congress as kind of badges of shame. We all need to be wearing this and looking at the best thing for me, though, is when I'm in an elevator with, let's say, some people who always vote for every spending bill. I just reached down and I turned up the brightness. I have three levels of brightness. And I've had the most passive aggressive possible thing you could do, but it's for such a good cause. So I can't even be mad. I had some people ask me if that's the number of steps I've taken. And I'm like, if I could run at the speed of light, I can't take, I wouldn't take this many steps this week. And then somebody asked me if it was the, the doomsday clock. Like, you know, when the liberal Democrats and I'm like, well, yeah, it kind of is. And my wife told me maybe I shouldn't wear this, you know, around the security guards and stuff. They would think it's a bomb, you know, and I said, well, it is a bomb. I'm going to wear it and let everybody know. The only thing is it doesn't count down. It counts up and we don't know where the trigger is and when the bomb goes off. Fair enough on that note. Thank you so much for talking to reason. Next time you see us, we will absolutely be wearing these pins. All around New York City wearing this awesome pin. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your time. Thanks Liz. Thanks Zach. Thank you. Thank you.