… agenda before the 2026 midterms.
Here’s the breakdown:
Benny Johnson: You have a better connection with the American people and the MAGA base than I think possibly any member of Congress. How do Republicans keep the House? How do Republicans win the midterms?
Rep. Tim Burchett: It's a structural problem, Benny. I think… Yes, I can't speak for the Senate. I don't know Thune that well. I mean, he calls me by my name—I'm sure he's got a bouncer or a handler that says, "That's Tim Burchett right there, say hello to him." "Oh, hey, Tim." But I feel like a lot of folks are undermined. I think you've got staffers in key spots that are crooked. I think they're in bed, literally or figuratively, with lobbyists, and they kill very good pieces of legislation. That's why you see study committees say they're going to study this bill for a year, and then it magically goes away. I think that's part of the design because they want to undermine Trump. Ultimately, they hate him because he is cutting off their money. And the Taliban bill, which I'll talk about in a minute, exactly—this proves my point, actually. I've talked about this a lot, and you and I have talked about it. But you have a staff… These committees are so big. I mean, I serve on one committee that I know of has at least 50 staffers on the Republican side. So you've got that on the Democrat side. You've got a great piece of legislation. It's not going anywhere. You go to the committee and say, "What's going on?" The chairman says, "Well, talk to this staffer, it's under their purview." You go in this office, and generally some of them are pretty arrogant. And it's kind of scary, an unelected bureaucrat who's sitting back there, no name, no face—nobody knows who they are except in this little world we live in, this little microcosm. And they've got the ear of a lobbyist, a paid lobbyist who's probably taken them out for drinks, steak dinner, maybe they went on a CODEL, you know, to some fancy place, Qatar or "Cutter" or whatever—or, I don't know, Myrtle Beach. So, the lobbyist has got their ear. Something shady's going on there. And they come to them and say, "Hey, man, we can't have this bill, it's going to kill us." You know? And so what do they do? The staff says, "Well, let's study this bill for a year, and then come back with a report," and force Congress to do that. And you know, as good as I do, Congress—our attention span is 30—we want our pizzas like our attention span, brother. It's 30 minutes or less. And we've moved on to another bright shiny object, some other calamities in the press that we're passing legislation on, that will absolutely do nothing for us. And that is the problem, the structure. And it's so big, you've got speakers and people in leadership, and people are undermining them. And you've got to remember, most members of Congress think they're going to be the next speaker or want to be the next speaker. So, in their mind, they don't want this speaker to succeed, and that they want to undermine them at whatever level they're going to be able to do that. And so you combine all that together, and that's why nothing happens. And you've got to have somebody that is not running for re-election that wants to be the dadgum speaker, and would just come in and just clean this trash can out, or it will never change. And they'll do the same thing under the Democrats, except with their Marxist agenda, we could lose everything. And it's very short-sighted. I think people want this speaker to fail so that they can run the minority party for four years or whatever and then take back the majority, and then they will be the speaker, and they will do what's right.
