Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about his run for the Senate, which includes a campaign ad that threatens a government shutdown if President Trump’s proposed border wall is not funded.
Marlow complimented Brooks on the craftsmanship of the ad, which is upbeat rather than angry as it sends what he called “a very tough message Washington needs to hear.”
“We’ve had promise after promise to build a border security wall,” Brooks said. “Congress has authorized it long ago, but Congress has refused to appropriate the money. Most recently in April, there was an opportunity to fund the border wall, but the United States Congress, in particular, the Senate, refused to come up with that funding that was necessary.”
“In effect, our Senate leadership, our Republican senators, have ceded to the Democrats the ability to block funding for the border wall,” he charged. “That was a keystone of President Trump’s campaign back in 2016. We need to keep our promises to the American people, and we need to start fighting back.”
“We should not be on bended knee, groveling and asking Chuck Schumer and the Democrats if we can please have the money to fund that wall,” said Brooks. “We’re the majority in the United States Senate, and the majority should rule, but right now, our Republican Senate has ceded to the Democrats the power over our agenda, the power over what we can vote on.”
“It’s effectively like this: a majority of our Senate, our Republicans, have empowered the Democrats to block the majority will of the Senate, to block the majority will of the House, to block the will of the President of the United States, and to block the will of the tens of millions of voters who sent us to Washington, DC, to fix not only this border wall problem, but a lot of other problems,” he said.
“If we’ve got the opportunity, we need to fight fire with fire, and we need to have a little bit more backbone than we’ve been showing in Washington, DC, on these issues that are critical to our country,” urged Brooks.
Brooks agreed with Marlow’s concern that the Senate would come up short on backbone.
“There are special interest groups offering tens of millions of dollars in direct or indirect campaign support that want this huge influx of cheap, inexpensive foreign labor that undercuts the living wages of American families,” Brooks said. “This is a key issue to those groups, primarily on the employer side.”
“We’ve got to have the backbone ourselves to overcome that and do what Americans needs,” he urged.
“Let me just give you a few examples as to how bad the problem is, which justifies us having border security on our southern border,” Brooks offered. “I’m going to cover some data points for you, so please bear with me. From the year 2000 to 2014, a 14-year period, in the age bracket 16 to 65, a very large age bracket, the American economy had a net gain of 5.6 million jobs. That’s 14 years, age 16-65, 5.6 million net job gain in that category. Your listeners ought to be asking themselves this question: how many of those jobs went to people born in America? Our kids and our grandkids.”
“I’m going to put you on the spot: what would be your guess?” he asked Marlow. “What do you think would be appropriate? Out of 5.6 million jobs, how many do you think should have gone to our kids?”
Marlow replied that “you would think all of them would go” to American citizens, or at least be offered to them first.
Brooks countered that the correct answer was “minus 127,000.”
“People born in other countries, whether here illegally or they’re lawful immigrants, had a net job gain of 5.7 million jobs when our economy, in that 16-65 age bracket over 14 years, was producing 5.6 million,” he clarified.
“That’s what our immigration policies are doing to American families. When I was young, you had different career options. One could be in the blue-collar trades, one if you’re lucky and you had the intellectual capacity you could go to college and get the jobs associated with that,” Brooks recalled. “Well, this immigration policy that we have, on the illegal alien side, is clobbering our blue-collar workforce, the people who work with their hands.”
“In the construction trades, by way of example – but not just the construction trades – it used to be when I was growing up that you could make a good living as a bricklayer or as a roofer or as a framer – all those types of positions that illegal aliens dominate now,” he said.
“The reason that’s so important that you develop that skill is that you might be good enough to where you could form your own business, and then you could start hiring other people and giving them an opportunity on the employment ladder,” he continued. “You yourself could be very, very successful in those construction trades and other blue-collar fields.”
“That’s gone now,” he lamented. “Our American kids have a very difficult time getting on the first rung of that ladder because the illegal aliens are undercutting the wages that might otherwise be paid on a second level, deficit and debt.”
“The last study that I saw, that I found credible – all of these studies are all over the map, but this one indicated that illegal aliens cost American families about $99 billion a year in net tax losses. The families of illegal aliens are generating about $20 billion a year in tax revenues while consuming about $119 billion in services provided at the city, county, state, and federal level. That increases our deficit and debt at the federal level. It decreases the services that are available to Americans at the city, county, state levels,” said Brooks.
“Now, I have seen a study that was as high as $300 billion, and maybe that’s the right one, but I’m comfortable with the $99 billion one, which is a little bit out of date because it’s three or four years old,” he added.
“Then on a second level, of all the families in America that have an illegal alien in them, over 60 percent are on welfare. So here we are, we’re actually paying illegal aliens to come to our country based on over 60 percent of the families that have an illegal alien in them being on welfare. For America as a whole, it’s in the 30 percentile range, just to give you a contrast point,” he said.
“So you add all these things up, and we’re doing tremendous damage to our families. On the employment level, let me be really clear: it did not make any difference if you were a Hispanic American, a Caucasian American, an African American, or an Asian American. You lost ground in that 14-year period that I just mentioned to you because of lost job opportunities and wage suppression. So this is not about ethnicity. It’s not about race. It’s about protecting Americans of all kinds. That’s what this border security wall is all about,” Brooks declared.
Marlow proposed that a government shutdown to compel construction of the border wall would likely end with Brooks and his allies getting pilloried by the media, as was the case when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) attempted to take a similar stance on repealing Obamacare.
“I want the country holding me accountable for trying to build a border security wall,” Brooks responded defiantly. “That’s the way I approach it. If the American people understand what is at stake on this issue, they are on our side overwhelmingly.”
“Now, I understand how the leftists and the media will attack, and they will distort, as they often do,” he conceded. “But, by golly, we were sent here to Washington, DC, not to cower, not to cede to the Democrats, who lost the elections control over our agenda. We were sent to Washington, DC, to fight for the things we told the American people we believed in, that caused the American people to elect us. It’s really that simple.”
“We cannot just give up on every single issue because of archaic Senate rules that empower the Democrats to block us. If we’re going to keep those rules, use them to advance our belief system on the one hand – or, better yet, we ought to get rid of those rules that empower the Democrats to control our agenda and block that border security wall,” he urged.
Brooks noted that he is running to fill the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he saluted as “a great leader on border security issues.”
“America cannot afford to have anything less than that in this Senate seat when we have our election on August 15, which is five weeks from today. That’s how quick it’s upcoming,” he said.
“If anyone wants to help, I would love the help. It’s MoBrooksForSenate.com. We need it. We’re quite frankly up against the swamp critters, as I call them in Washington, DC.”
“You know, Donald Trump went to Washington to drain the swamp. Well, now the swamp’s fighting back, and they’re fighting back on behalf of Luther Strange. He’s the person who was appointed by our governor under ethically questionable circumstances,” said Brooks, referring to his opponent in the race.
When Marlow asked if Brooks had faith in the willingness and ability of the Republican caucus to deliver the promised border wall, he said yes, provided American voters “keep the pressure up.”
“This revolution started in 2010 with the Tea Party movement, and to some degree, the fervor that we had in 2010 has subsided,” Brooks observed. “Politics is an ongoing process. If there’s a vacuum, our foes will fill it. So we need to get people who care about America, who understand the foundational principles that have made us the greatest nation in world history, to gird their loins, put on their battle gear, get back into the fray, and force our elected officials in Washington, DC, to keep our promises to the American people, or else take out those who breach those promises. That’s what it’s going to come down to.”
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