Senator Ron Johnson: How a Huge Federal Government Corrupts Everything

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This is the 30 minute TV version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Senator Ron Johnson The longer-form version was released on Epoch TV on December 21, 2024.

🔴 Watch the extended version of this episode: https://ept.ms/Y1221SenRonJohnson

In the next Congress, Johnson will become chairman again of the homeland security committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has uniquely powerful subpoena powers to investigate crime and corruption within the U.S. government and beyond.

In this wide-ranging episode, Senator Johnson dives into the future of the Make America Healthy Again movement; what Johnson believes are the key steps for the incoming administration to restore transparency, scientific integrity, and small government; and why Congress needs to retake its oversight authority.

Senator Johnson: “The genius of our founding fathers was they came from dictatorial monarchies, you know, totalitarian regimes. But they realized, men and women, we're not angels. If we don't want to live in anarchy and chaos. We need some governing authority, but they realize that governing authority would be, by and large, something to fear. It had to be limited, had to be contained.”

CHAPTER TITLES
0:00:00 - Introduction and Overview of the Meeting
0:01:08 - Senator Ron Johnson's Perspective on the Trump Administration's Priorities
0:02:22 - Addressing the "Make America Healthy Again" Initiative
0:07:10 - Concerns About Corruption in Scientific Research and Government Agencies
0:10:00 - The Need for Congress to Reassert its Oversight Authority
0:14:53 - Thoughts on the Confirmation Process for Key Appointments
0:17:23 - Optimism About the New Administration's Approach to Transparency
0:19:26 - Discussions on the Concept of Subsidiarity in Governance

How government corrupted big business: “Big business has done all kinds of wonderful things, big agriculture has fed the world, okay, but government grows, government regulates, government probably over regulates. And so these businesses naturally figure out, well, how can we survive this environment of over taxation, over regulation? Well, they go beyond that. I mean, they get smart enough to realize, not only can we survive in this but we can turn that regulatory agency to our advantage and to the disadvantage of our competitors. And when you're turning it to the disadvantage of your competitors, you're crushing competition, and all of a sudden, the consumer gets crushed. So to me, the problem is government power.”

How government corrupted science: “I think that Bobby Kennedy's first task is to bring integrity back to scientific research across the board, and then we need to end the corporate capture of these federal agencies and that corruption as well. Now that's a big task, because we are up against, as you as we all know from COVID, those of us who are fighting that same battle, we're up against powerful forces. They are going to be relentless, and they're, you know, the people that are captured by them in the media, whether they realize it or not.”

Johnson about Congress: ““Because Congress is a bunch of wimps that don't want to be held accountable, they have willingly, over the decades, given their constitutional authority over the executive branch. So we don't pass conscriptive laws any or prescriptive laws anymore. We passed these frameworks with a really nice name, like patient protected, patient protection, Affordable Care Act didn't either. It's like here, administration, give us 20,000 pages you fill in the blanks, you protect patients, you make health care affordable. Of course, they didn't do it.”

“Congress has willingly given up a lot of its constitutional authority. We don't have three equal, three co equal branches of government anymore. The executive is probably most powerful, combined with the courts, Congress is just a shadow of itself. We've let our oversight authority atrophy. We don't enforce it.”

“Oversight authority is probably our greatest authority and greatest responsibility. We've got to fund the government. But then, once we funded it, we need to take a look at what we funded. Did what we passed? Did it actually work?"

“I have five Investigators now, they're good. They do a lot of really good work, but five to do oversight investigations on a federal government that spends almost $7 trillion and employs a couple million people. It's literally a joke.”

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