All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is Dave Nall.
He is the national chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, the conscience of the Republican party.
Welcome to the show, Dave.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me on.
Uh, well, I appreciate you joining us today.
Uh, tell me about, uh, the Republican Liberty Caucus first of all.
Oh, Republican Liberty Caucus is a organization that was founded back in the early 1990s.
Um, uh, to be a sort of home for Goldwater Republicans and Republicans who sort of subscribe to traditional values of Robert Taft and going back to the founding of the party, Republicans who believe in limited government, um, and individual liberty.
And, uh, sort of abiding by the ideas of the founding fathers.
Uh, it's a, an organization which has grown a lot in the last couple of years.
Um, we have among our advisory board, people like Gary Johnson and, uh, Ron Paul.
Ron Paul was actually chair of the RLC for a little while, uh, around 2000.
And, uh, you know, we've got chapters in 42 states.
Now we have my tens of thousands of members and, uh, we work on issues and we work on, uh, supporting candidates.
And, uh, we try to heighten the awareness of people in the Republican party of sort of the kind of party that it could be, how it could be a sort of better, uh, a party that appeared more to the constitution and more to the ideals of liberty, uh, the way that it used to, uh, back in the early sixties and before, and, uh, we've made some progress and, uh, we've gotten a lot of our people elected to Congress in the last election, uh, for a while it was just Ron Paul up there, but because of the RLC and other groups, we've now got, uh, not just Tea Party people in there, but real liberty Republicans, uh, in office like Justin Amash and Mike Lee, uh, and about 20 others, um, who are promoting a whole different view of what government should be like and, and where the limits of government power should be.
Wow.
About 20 others, huh?
Yeah.
And how good are they?
How good do you gotta be to join?
Well, we don't have a witness test on joining the RLC.
Um, we can't go out and, you know, give everybody an interview, um, but you aren't going to join the organization unless you subscribe to the statement of principles, uh, which is on our website and sort of outlined a fairly simply, uh, you know, sort of, uh, laid back and limited approach to, uh, government, uh, the idea that government should be off our backs, out of our wallets as much as possible and allow people to live their lives in freedom, uh, and without, uh, afflicting others.
Um, probably the same principle that most of your listeners adhere to as well.
Um, we're not radical libertarians.
Um, you know, we're not, uh, on the fringe of the sort of, uh, uh, far left or I guess not far left, far left, right out there in the, in the fringe anarchist wing of the libertarian party.
Um, we believe in, in having a government at least.
Um, but we want that government to do all of those things which are essential and to stay out of people's lives as much as possible.
Um, and to abide by certain basic, you know, libertarian principles, uh, wherever possible.
Um, you know, and as far as the people we have in office, they did all go through a test.
Um, the, you know, the candidates that we endorse, uh, fill out a extensive questionnaire, which asks them specific questions.
And if they do well on it, then we approve them.
If they don't, then we don't.
And we have additional questionnaires like that for state level, uh, candidates as well.
And you can see that it works because, uh, in the recent death limit debate, for example, um, while the Tea Party people mostly switched over and voted for Boehner, uh, for Boehner's plan, the sort of this horrible compromise they had, uh, there were about 20 some who didn't, and every single one of those was an RLC endorsee.
And of our endorsees, um, out of the 22 we have in the house, only one switched over and voted for Boehner's plan.
Oh, that's good.
I'm glad to hear that.
That reflects very well on your organization.
And again, everybody, it's Dave Nall from the Republican Liberty Caucus.
The website is rlc.org.
And Dave, you sent this thing out called Don't Believe the Hype.
Meet the real Rick Perry.
And, uh, in introducing this, I have a bit of a mea culpa, which is that, uh, I'm no good on state politics really at all.
I mean, I hear tell in the wind and whatever, but most of them concerned with foreign policy on this show and national government stuff.
Uh, so, uh, you know, I have to plead guilty to, uh, ignorance on Rick Perry's real record here in Texas.
And I was wondering if you could help me out.
Well, you know, my background is as a national policy kind of guy too, but I live here in Texas and, uh, I've been involved with the Texas RLC and this, uh, press release that you've got came out as a result of the Texas RLC putting together a working group, uh, when they knew that Perry was likely to declare for the presidency to look into Perry's record and go through all the things that he had done and figure out how his record really stood up to the reputation he was trying to establish as a presidential candidate.
And out of about 30 or 40 items that they came up with, we boiled it down to five that were really the most important, most universal items that we should bring up, uh, to show that Perry, you know, he's going to sell himself as a national presidential candidate as a small government, uh, you know, uh, limited government, uh, and, uh, big Liberty kind of guy, um, a tea party candidate and all that.
Uh, but that's really not his record.
If you look at what he's actually done in Texas, uh, he is both a big government, a big corporate, uh, governor here in Texas.
And he's also, uh, been very cavalier about his attitude towards liberal liberty in a number of areas.
And we brought those up, uh, you know, a couple of each, uh, in this press release, which was limited to five items.
Uh, and it's been received a lot of public attention.
Uh, a lot of media looked at it.
A lot of people around the country have been concerned about it.
It's been repeated, you know, through Facebook and social media, uh, enormous numbers of times, um, because it lays out and pretty straightforward terms.
The fact that Perry, although he has some good qualities really isn't the kind of fiscal conservative pro Liberty guy that he'd like us to think he is.
Um, I can go into specifics if you'd like.
Uh, yeah, well, first of all, let me just say I'm posting on my Facebook page right now.
That's a good idea that you had there.
I think people should get this out.
I really consider Rick Perry to be a great threat.
I'm not worried about Michelle Bachman getting the nomination.
And, and obviously Mitt Romney has a lot of problems in a lot of areas, no point in even getting into it because we never stop.
And so Rick Perry is the real threat.
It seems like to me, and I think it's really important that people get a handle on, you know, what he's really about.
Now we're pretty short on time for this segment, but I guess let's at least start with, uh, uh, number one on your list here, the business slush funds.
That sounds like a Texas Republican type of thing.
Fill me in.
Well, Perry is a big business guy.
He has ties to big business.
He's got lots of friends who are working for businesses, lobbyists and other other roles.
And what Perry did is he uses money of the state legislature made available through the governor's office for these enterprise funds, um, to subsidize businesses moving to Texas or relocating or expanding their operations in Texas.
Um, with the idea that he would have the state give them tax money, um, to underwrite some of their expenses in exchange for that they would, you know, create more jobs and grow the tax base.
The problem with this whole theory is that when you give them the money, there's really no obligation for them to do the things that you asked them to do with that money.
And the result is that a lot of these companies came to Texas and then either left or didn't expand their operations or downsized or went out of business before any kind of payoff came back from the investment that Perry made in them.
Classic example of countrywide financial, which came here, uh, Perry getting $25 million to locate a center here in Texas.
And when they did, they almost immediately went out of business and shut it down.
Um, so the state was still out that $25 million, but we got nothing back in the way of job growth or additional tax revenue from whatever business they were doing here.
And that's the problem with these plans.
They're basically subsidizing certain businesses at the expense of other businesses.
And in many cases, what happened with Perry's usually enterprise fund is that the people who got the money were companies where the former Perry associates were working or they're donated to his campaigns or they had some sort of friendly relationship with for one reason or another.
Um, so it was very much a case of favoritism and we have all these small businesses in Texas which create jobs much more efficiently than big businesses do.
And if that money had been given to small businesses or who had just been left in the general population by not taxing people so much, it would have been much more to help the economy than subsidizing these large corporations did with the sort of inefficient system of cronyism that Perry practiced.
Yeah, boy, and that's something that just never goes away in Texas politics on the local level either.
It's always some kind of special subsidy for this company or that company.
A lot of times, you know, land gets stolen and reappropriated by the state for these purposes and then it never pans out the way they say it is terribly inefficient, isn't it?
Oh yeah, and Perry's a big land grabber, too, of course.
His plan for the Trans-Texas Corridor involves seizing a great deal of private land by eminent domain, including some of my neighbors because I live right near where it was supposed to be built and where the remaining parts of it are actually built, like Harbor 130.
They know family farms were broken up and people lost a lot of, you know, assets that have been their family for generations.
It disrupted entire communities.
When the Trans-Texas Corridor was going to be built, the plan was actually going to wipe out most of the city of Elgin, Texas.
It was a pretty outrageous land grab and that money, you know, from all that land was going to build the highways, was ultimately going to be run by foreign interests that Perry had relationships with, to the profit of foreign corporations, like Infra, which funds the toll roads.
Amazing.
All right, well, we've got to hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Dave Nall from the Republican Liberty Caucus.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're talking with Dave Nall from the Republican Liberty Caucus about Rick Perry and we got to make at least a little bit about, make this interview at least a little bit about foreign policy, Dave, so that we can put it on Antiwar.com.
I wanted to direct people to Phil Giroldi's article today on Antiwar.com, as well as Josh Rogan's piece at Foreign Policy, where he is absolutely staking out the Dick Cheney-ish position on foreign policy, including even having Douglas Fyfe and Bill Lutie and Zalmay Khalilzad give him his briefings and is saying, you know, he's unapologetically for national greatness overseas and all these things, you know, like the first half of the Bush years, something like that, and he's clearly staked that position out as hawk among hawks.
Isn't that right, as far as you know?
Do you know anything other than that?
Yeah, he hasn't had a lot of opportunities yet to really talk on foreign policy.
I know he had Rumsfeld down here last week as one of his prime advisors on all this, and he's also talked to other people you mentioned, and I think it's reasonable to assume that he would pursue a Bush-like foreign policy, hopefully not as ridiculous as Bush's, but it's going to be a, you know, a more aggressive foreign policy of some sort.
He has no foreign policy experience, no foreign policy background, and, you know, no history of major statements on foreign policy, but he's going to go with what he thinks will sell to your sort of mainstream Republicans as he sees them, which is going to be a more conservative foreign policy, fairly anti-Islamic, and, you know, a more conservative foreign policy, a more aggressive foreign policy, and I don't think that there is any reason to expect that he would get us out of these ridiculous wars that we're in.
Maybe he would shut down Libya just because it was an Obama project, but, you know, I don't think he'd get us out of Afghanistan any faster than everybody else is getting us out of there, and I hope that he would not open up new fronts in Congress, but it's too early to really know how subverted his foreign policy will be.
But, you know, this is how the Neocons got into power in the first place.
The Republican Party, as a whole, had a bunch of people who were in leadership positions who had no foreign policy experience at all, and that describes Terry to a T, and people with no foreign policy experience go looking for someone to provide them with that experience, and the Neocons are out there with a prepackaged program for foreign policy, essentially, that they claim is conservative.
So if you're an inexperienced guy in foreign policy and you're a governor, and you come into a more prominent office like president, here they are, ready to give you a foreign policy, you know, made from scratch.
It's just that it may not be one that really is such a great idea, unfortunately.
That's how they work.
I wonder about the politics of it, though.
I mean, from your position as chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, the national chairman, in your experience at this point, does it seem like that really is good politics, that that's what people want to hear right now?
Well, from my perspective, of course not.
No, but I mean, aside from your opinion, I mean, your taste of what's going on out there inside Republican politics, I guess.
Well, you know, there are a lot of Republicans now who have become very disenchanted with the whole war policy.
I mean, most Republicans I talk to like the idea of a Reagan-like foreign policy.
Reagan was not a non-interventionist, but Reagan was very limited in how much he intervened.
What he did was covert operations and the occasional, very quick, in-and-out kind of intervention.
That kind of thing most Republicans, I think, could go along with, where we remain a strong force in foreign policy, but we don't have to have our troops deployed by the hundreds of thousands in other countries all the time.
That's unsupportable, not only on a sort of moral basis, a practical basis, but as far as the expenses are concerned.
And most Republicans understand.
I mean, anybody who's looked at the budget can look at it and say, gosh, the crisis we're in right now, if we hadn't been spending $700 billion a year on military expenses, we wouldn't be in as bad a state of shape as we are now.
That's pretty obvious.
Most Republicans, I think, can get that message.
They want America to be a strong country.
They want us not to back down from our enemies.
But that doesn't mean that we have to go out and harass those enemies constantly, the way that Bush and Obama seem to think is a good idea.
How far Perry will go in accepting a more neocon-aggressive foreign policy, I don't know.
He may have advisors on the other side who are from local politics here in Texas telling him, listen to these guys, hear what they have to say, take their good ideas and leave the bad ones behind.
I hope that's what's happening, but we'll never know really until we get to the point where he's tested, which won't really happen until after he's president, probably.
Yeah.
Well, I sure hope they have some good fights about it.
You know, we still have more than a year to go here.
And of course, we know from last time, no matter what happens really in the primaries, Ron Paul isn't dropping out until the convention.
And so I hope that they really fight about this.
It just so happens, Dave, that the only guy who knows anything about it in the presidential election right now is the anti-war guy.
And up against Rick Perry, I think we're in for some good time, some good TV at least, you know?
Yeah, we know the other guy.
Actually, I'm not going to support him or anything, but Huntsman has foreign policy experience.
And it would be nice if he were out there talking more about it.
I think he's relatively against these foreign interventions.
It would be nice to have more than just Ron Paul saying this.
And it would be nice if people were listening to him.
I mean, I don't know how much Perry and his advisors listen to what the other candidates are saying, but it's clear that some of the candidates, like Romney, for example, have been listening a little bit.
Romney has made some statements which are much less pro-war.
In the first debate, he virtually came out and said that he wanted to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
And then he kind of backtracked on that afterwards.
Obviously, some of the candidates are thinking about these things.
Yeah, Romney is a perfect weathervane.
He's just like the rooster on top of the farmhouse up there.
He's better than anyone probably at licking his thumb and holding it into the wind and figuring out which way to go and what he's supposed to say at any given moment.
Right.
And he seems to have gotten a better read on it than Perry has.
Although Perry is also very good at that.
I wouldn't be surprised if down the road Perry's advisors at least started telling him, you know, maybe lay off on some of this and take it a little more cautiously.
But no matter what, he's still part of this network of insider Republicans who favor a large defense establishment, who are going to support...
I mean, just his big business connection suggests that he's going to support the idea of the big business of war.
And you don't build a giant war machine if you aren't intending to use it.
He's not going to be one of these guys, who there are a lot of in the Republican Party, who want to go in and rethink the way our military operates and redirect it towards other purposes.
I don't think that's going to be on his agenda, at least it doesn't seem that way right now.
Right.
Well, back to the whole we still have more than a year to go on the election thing.
I'm really excited about this.
I'm really looking forward to this because, of course, it's just absolutely preposterous that you can be a deficit hawk and for constitutional government and a Tea Party guy and all this and still want a world empire that costs more than a trillion dollars per year.
And they're not going to be able to keep up that argument, that they're not going to cut the Pentagon at all or scale back the empire at all.
And yet, yeah, they're just as much of a deficit hawk as Ron Paul, which is obviously what the people want to hear right now.
Right.
I mean, the only area of discretionary spending that you can cut, the huge amount of money that needs to be cut, is the military.
And that should be obvious to anyone in the Republican Party who has any sense at all about how budgets work.
And that's a reality that I could be able to deny, I don't think.
So, you know, whether they want it or not, some of this stuff is going to have to come to an end, and hopefully sooner rather than later.
Obama has overcommitted himself, and I don't think he's going to back down from it.
Clearly, you don't get much of a difference no matter which party you get into power.
That being the case, there's a real opportunity for Republicans to listen to what Ron Paul is saying, to listen to what some of the people who've analyzed the budget are saying, and maybe say, you know, maybe just stop here and look at the situation and turn things around.
Now, to Perry's credit, he's not a George W. Bush guy.
He and the Bush organization have had some conflicts in the past.
He had conflicts with Bush when he was lieutenant governor and Bush was governor.
And since then, they haven't been totally close.
So he's not, you know, he doesn't have an obligation to continue Bush's foreign policy or anything like that.
He could easily start over from scratch and do it his own way.
The key thing is to figure out how to influence him to make his way a better way.
Yeah.
Well, I wanted to, and I'm glad we did take the time to talk about foreign policy there.
All very good stuff.
But I also want to let you get back to this list of some of the things about Rick Perry that people, especially outside of Texas, probably have never heard, might not get a chance to hear again.
We talked about the business slush funds and the toll roads and land seizures, the Texas corridor plan that was defeated, by the way, right?
He lost big time on that, right?
Yeah, the way that got shut down really was other states.
It required to really work and had to have states around us to cooperate with Texas on it so that you could hook the highway up and make it a nationwide system.
But that fell apart when states like Oklahoma and Arkansas and some of the states in the Midwest just didn't want to spend the money on this kind of a giant highway project.
And the result was that he was not going to be able to expand beyond Texas.
And then the Texas legislature began getting very concerned about some of the land seizures.
And there was just too much opposition, so the whole thing fell apart.
Now, I don't know if there ever was a golden era when politicians really tried to disguise this kind of thing, and it wasn't so obvious, but the story of Merck and Gardasil and Rick Perry's effort to try to make that mandatory just seems to me like the textbook political corruption, where it was simply money changed hands and the guy tried to do an executive order on this thing, right?
Right.
Well, there you get into the other aspect of what we were concerned about with Perry.
On the one hand, there's the big business cronyism.
On the other hand, there's the complete disregard for civil liberties that he's shown.
One example of that, of course, being the situation with Gardasil, where he decided it was a good idea to vaccinate every 12-year-old girl in the state with the human pavilion virus vaccine, which is a vaccine which can be potentially beneficial.
But it's a decision that shouldn't be made by the state government, and certainly shouldn't be done with tax dollars, and it shouldn't be done for the schools, where the parents assume that everything's mandatory and they can't get out of it, although there was an opt-out option in the proposal.
It's very anti-individual liberty, very much state meddling in people's private lives, and in this case, it was at a cost of $360 per vaccine, and all that going to a single corporation, that being Merck.
And Perry's connections to Merck were very questionable.
His former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Merck, who had been paid $250,000 by the company to convince Perry and his staff that this was a great idea.
And it isn't a great idea.
There's a big difference between vaccinating kids for measles, which is a common, dangerous disease, and vaccinating them for something like HPV, which is entirely preventable through other means.
It's an STD, which you don't get unless you engage in unprotected sex.
And even then, it's relatively rare.
It's just a crazy thing to be vaccinating every girl in Texas for.
And it's kind of vaccine-happy, in a sense.
It's kind of out of control.
The state can do this.
Wow, what a great opportunity to do something ridiculous with state power.
And Perry, ultimately, just last week, Perry apologized for it.
I guess it got to him right after our press release.
He made a statement on Saturday where he said that it was a mistake, and he regrets ever having done it.
He should have realized that much sooner.
He should have realized that four years ago when the state legislature voted almost unanimously to shut it down.
In fact, when he lost the thing, it's very important to point out that this is the first time he's changed his tune on this.
Back when he lost, he basically said everyone in the state legislature that voted to override his executive order on this thing, which thank goodness they found a way to do that, that at least the people that voted with him will never have to know that they caused somebody to die of cancer like you got.
And he fought like hell over this thing.
He was very petty over it.
It was his pet project.
And didn't it turn out that this thing was actually very dangerous, that it was brand new, and it hadn't really been tested very well?
It had only been out for a year.
It had not been extensively tested.
I'm not a big anti-vaccine guy, but I've looked at the statistics.
It is actually, the rate of bad side effects from it is maybe three times as high as from most of the common vaccines.
That's still a very small percentage of bad side effects, but some of the bad side effects were pretty bad.
We're talking about people losing their lives, basically being paralyzed.
Horrible neurological side effects, but still in a fairly small number of people.
Not large enough to make the vaccine unmarketable or anything like that.
Not much enough to have it declared unsafe.
What's come out since then, actually, is the vaccine isn't all that effective.
As it turns out, it's not as they thought it was.
It doesn't prevent the disease universally the way they had hoped.
It really isn't worth the investment or the risk that was involved in administering it the way that he wanted to do.
Certainly, it wasn't some no-problem type of deal that you could just make it mandatory.
As you say, it's not like measles or something where these kids could all just cough on each other and have an outbreak of some horrible disease at the school.
Exactly.
Polio or something that's extremely communicable.
Exactly.
The whole idea of mass vaccination is to prevent epidemics, and you cannot have an epidemic on STD.
People don't catch it by casual contact.
It doesn't fit into the pattern that you should have for a reliable vaccination program.
All right.
Now, we're already over time, but can you tell me real quick about what he did to scuttle the anti-TSA bill?
Yeah.
That was his other big civil liberties issue that came up just this year.
We had a bill introduced by Representative David Simpson that was going to basically make it difficult for the TSA to do their intrusive searches of airline passengers.
Although it was very popular with the legislature and with the population here in Texas, what happened is that right at the last minute, Perry signed on and said he was going to push it through and make sure it was introduced in the special session so that it would pass.
He realized how popular it was.
Then when it came to the special session, Perry introduced it so late that it was technically impossible for him to get the number of votes necessary to pass the bill by the deadline for the end of the session.
So Perry basically made it look like he was supporting the bill, but at the same time, through his inaction, he guaranteed it would be almost impossible to pass it, and the result was the bill died before he could get his last vote on the last day of the session.
I think I remember learning at Austin Community College that that's how they do it in the Texas State Legislature.
They'll tell you all day how hard they're working on doing what you want while they're killing it with the calendar.
Simple as that.
You've got to keep an eye on them.
There's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes, and Perry was very good at that kind of thing.
That really sums up a lot about Perry.
Perry likes to say the right thing.
He likes to say what people want him to say.
But a lot of the time, he doesn't follow through, or he really has a different agenda of his own in the background.
He has to be aware, he has to be prepared for that when dealing with him.
All right, well thank you very much for your time on the show today, Dave.
It's been great.
Thanks for having me on.
Everybody, that's Dave Nall from the Republican Liberty Caucus.
That's rlc.org.
