Welcome to Politically Speaking.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion, Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Director of Community Engagement and the American Democracy Project at Indiana University, South Bend.

Today, we are talking with Congressman Tim Walberg, who is serving his eighth term in Congress, representing Michigan's fifth Congressional District, located in the southern part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

Thanks for joining us, Congressman.

Well, it's good to be with you.

And representing the new fifth District, which goes from Lake Erie to Lake Michigan.

We, of course, have the entire Indiana border that borders our state as part of it, including Lake Michigan.

So we're getting more used to South Bend and all of the assets that are there.

And I'm I appreciate the chance to to be on your program.

Wonderful.

Well, we know that both our Indiana viewers and our Michigan viewers are excited to hear what you have to say.

And we particularly appreciate this ability to help folks in your district to learn more about you.

I want to start by asking you a question about the debt ceiling.

The debt ceiling, of course, is the maximum amount that the federal government can borrow to meet its existing legal obligations.

And you voted for the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which raised the US debt ceiling about 88% of the House Freedom Caucus and 34% of the Progressive Caucus voted against the negotiating deal and negotiated a deal.

But you decided ultimately to vote for the deal.

Why did you make that decision?

Why did you think it was important?

Well, I think ultimately the only choice to do the right thing was to vote that way.

It's not that I like raising a debt ceiling or even supporting a debt generally voted against debt ceilings.

But this was an issue where for the first time that I can remember, we were actually voting to raise the debt ceiling for a period of time up to 2025, but also putting spending reform in place.

I know a number of my colleagues felt that it would be easier to let some of us, including Democrats, vote for it and they could go back to their districts and describe themselves as fighters against debt.

And knowing that if we didn't do it, they would be in a problem situation.

So I just felt adults in the room and me needed to do the right thing when in fact, we, for the first time in the history of the Congress, passed a bill with the largest reduction in spending over the deficit in the history of Congress.

Now, $2 trillion isn't something that we necessarily want to crow about, but it was easy to reduce the debt and reduce deficit.

Then we would have done it a long time ago.

This was the opportunity to do that and then to put in place a number of other, I think, very important provisions, not the least of which was to put a work work requirement back in to receive a food stamp.

You know, several welfare funding issues, including Medicaid for able bodied employable adults without dependents between the age of 18 and 54.

We would again put a work requirement in that was instituted and very much the same under Bill Clinton and then taken out under President Obama.

We want people to be part of the American dream, to give them incentive to to go back and be self-supporting.

And this was a way that we can do it.

We ended the suspension of the student loan debt nonpayment, feeling that, wait a second, if you signed the contract, you ought to be paying your bills.

So by instituting the repayment schedule again, we will save the taxpayer about $5 billion a month.

Those are some of the good things that were in this proposal.

Was it enough?

No.

But it was better they were then we were going to get an a clean debt ceiling that the president wanted that Chuck Schumer in the Senate wanted.

And they initially said they were not going to negotiate with us to do any of these reforms.

There was a clean debt ceiling or nothing.

I'm glad Kevin McCarthy held out strongly and said, no, we are not going to negotiate unless we have reforms in place as well.

So I believe the benefit will be shown in the future relatively quickly of having done something that that makes sense.

We don't default.

We can't default.

We have to move our country forward.

We want the dollar to be the currency of the world and not the yuan.

From China.

And so this is a step in that direction.

But now, as Newt Gingrich said, when he applauded our efforts, he said we build on it even as we did in the in the Contract with America.

Now, when we come to the appropriations process, we've got laws in place through this proposal that we can build upon, and we don't have to start anew putting them into law.

So when you talk about being the adult in the room, you're talking about the point you just made about not defaulting, affecting the U.S. credit rating and causing great instability in financial markets, that something has to happen.

And although not everything that you wanted is in the package, at least you got some of what you wanted.

Elizabeth, I think you're right there.

We put through thankfully, we put through the Limit, Save, Grow Act as a Republican conference in the House.

Remember, the Senate did nothing.

They offered us nothing.

The White House offered us nothing except a clean debt ceiling.

And so for us to initially put forward something with all Republican votes, we asked Democrats to join us, but they didn't.

And that puts some significant bargaining chips in place for us really to crawl to control today.

And ultimately, Kevin McCarthy, when he saw that Senator Schumer was not going to be part of the negotiations in a productive way.

And Hakeem Jeffries, Jeffries of the minority in the House was not going to be a productive negotiator.

It came down to just simply the president's and Kevin McCarthy, who said, Mr. President, we're going to negotiate.

The rest of you can leave the room and we're going to find a way to move something forward that will make sense.

In the end, we got about 90% of what we had in the Limit, Save, Grow, Act.

I've been told by military generals, etc., that in war the enemy has a vote.

And so you have to consider that when you make your decisions and how you deal with your war in Congress, it's the same way the opposition has a vote as well.

So to get something through that was meaningful and would move us in the right direction with $2 trillion of savings to start and some stipulations in place that we wouldn't have got through on single issue bills.

It made good sense to negotiate toward a deal.

In the end.

And I think, as I said, we saw Democrats who saw the writing on the wall and now they could go back and say, look what we were able to accomplish, even though it ended up being only the House Republicans and the White House negotiating the deal, we move forward.

And I think the fact is that's off the table now.

We can work toward solving our spending problem because we don't have a revenue problem.

As you might be aware, Elizabeth, it's a it's a spending problem that we have not a not a revenue problem.

We have more revenue coming in than in the history of United States.

Thankfully, as a result of that, that Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that we put through back under the Trump administration that's still in place.

Revenue is coming in, but we've got to stop the spending and that's what this effort is all about.

Let me ask you a question, because you mentioned you don't like that this could possibly be extended to families and individuals don't like being in debt, but you also don't like that for the country yet.

The debt ceiling has rise continually under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Is there any way to avoid this in the future or is increasing debt inevitable?

Increasing debt is inevitable for a while because we have interest that's accruing.

And unless we start cutting spending and that's going to that's going to hurt, entities are going to feel it.

But if we don't do it, if we keep on the same pace by 20 2030, we will have a $10 trillion interest debt alone.

Now, you're probably aware that 70% or better of our budget is mandatory, and that's difficult to get at.

We were only talking about the less than 20% of our budget, which is discretionary spending.

So it makes it difficult unless we're willing to restructure that and then be honest as adults and not use, for instance, to talk about reforming Social Security or Medicare spending automatically brings out the threats and the fear factor that Republicans are going to end Social Security.

That's not true at all.

Republicans are on Social Security as well.

Republicans are on Medicare as well.

We have to make sure that the promises made a promise kept.

But is there a way to reform some of this mandatory spending, which is most in those areas that will make sense for employees down the road?

Some who haven't even started to work yet so that we secure what's in place now for people who have involuntarily paid into the system and ought to receive the promise that they were given and still make sense for the future.

So that means we start with discretionary spending, a lesser unless we're willing to bite the bullet and do some reductions in spending where we can, we'll never get it any other place.

And the debt will go up and up and up and ultimately flounder our system.

I would hope that by doing that, what we did this year, next year, we won't have to face a debt ceiling increase in the next year if we do the same thing, it begins to ratchet down.

And then as our economy grows, as it will, without this debt problem, continually slapping us in the face and using the revenue to help grow the economy through tax cuts continued unless the private sector do the wonderful things that they and they alone can do, I think we'll get ourselves back in whack.

And that's a technical term.

And and we can start giving incentive for the private sector to succeed.

Still further by innovation development, we can grow our economy and we can grow our freedoms as well.

One last thing on this, because as you talk about getting things, you know, back and not having them out of whack and really getting them back into shape, a part of that seems like the political parties would have to avoid the temptation portion of the blame game.

I'm thinking about President Biden, for example, laying the blame for the $31 trillion debt on the Trump administration, saying that President Trump increased the debt by 40% in four years.

But of course, ignoring the pandemic and the fact that both Democrats and Republicans supported some of those spending plans or noting that President Obama's tax cuts, an extension of the Bush tax cuts, actually were more extensive than Donald Trump's.

So it just seems like each party likes to be letting the other party.

And sometimes we hear the members of the American public say, you know, is does this need to come down to the wire where we seem to be in danger of default?

Or is this all about credit claiming or political gamesmanship?

To what extent is it performative or to what extent do you think it's substantive as you think about the reason we keep seeming to come right to the brink of default, or so the headlines would suggest when it comes to these kind of negotiations as well as.

But this is a yes or no answer.

And you hate that answer yes, because sometimes it takes that that extreme challenge to motivate us into action.

But it didn't have to.

That's where the know answer would come in.

We passed after 97 days of waiting for the president after he told the speaker that they would meet to discuss the debt ceiling issue.

It took 97 days for him to finally come to the table and call Kevin McCarthy and say, let's let's sit down.

And that was only after we passed the Limit, Save, Grow Act out of frustration that it's it's getting close.

So on April 26th, well before a month's before we came down to passing this debt ceiling bill, we had passed legislation to fix it, which included lifting the debt ceiling.

Under the bill it would go to would have gone to 2024 as opposed to 2025, where we had a cap of $1.5 trillion.

And that was negotiated out of that.

But that was done early enough to get it done so we wouldn't be in a situation where it was do or die.

So in that case, we would have to say, in all honesty, Republicans stepped up to the plate, offered a sincere solution that met the debt ceiling problem, as well as restructuring some of the spending which we had told the president we had to have.

We can't just keep raising the debt and spending and printing money without a problem coming.

So there's where that yes or no is.

I'd love it to have been, even if the Democrats had all voted as they did voted against the limit saved grow bill.

But then Senator Schumer would have taken that, altered it or offered another solution, send it back to the House.

We could have gone to conference committee well before the deadline and completed something like we're supposed to do.

So, yeah, there's there's blame to go around on both sides over history.

But in this case, it wasn't a history.

It was the 118th Congress with the responsibility, along with President Biden, to do the job for the American people.

We ought to do.

And in the end, it came down to the last ditch effort at the wire to get something across the board.

And I'm glad that we showed the leadership in the House Republican Conference to least initiate the solution.

And now let's move on in the appropriations process, learn from our failures as well as successes, and do what the American people expect us to do.

Right.

And of course, a big philosophical divide over where that money should go, so to be continued.

I want to ask about another issue that's captured a lot of headlines, and that is privacy concerns raised regarding the very popular social media platform.

TikTok.

It is particularly popular, as you know, with young people and but there are concerns about how they handle personal data.

What are your thoughts on the privacy implications of TikTok and what measures do you think should be taken?

And are there any laws that should be passed in your view?

You know, a significant privacy concerns with all platforms, but especially TikTok, because it is Chinese Communist Party controlled.

And if you saw my questioning of the chairman of TikTok when he, we believe, was caught in a lie about where these records and the data was held and who could see them, he said, no, the Chinese Communist Party couldn't see them.

And now we found out that that's not a true and that's our concern.

It's one thing to have Facebook.

It's one thing to have Elon Musk.

It's one thing you have Bill Gates or whoever have information that they can use A.I.

or they can use algorithms to compile and use for us or against us almost immediately.

Sometimes I think I just have to think about something and I get an ad that pops up.

Its sure does seem that way, doesn't it?

It's crazy.

And so it's it's a it's a very, very creative tension.

We have.

If we would have locked down the Internet when Al Gore initially developed it and I say that tongue and cheek, we wouldn't have had an amazing, amazing communication tool, research tool and the capabilities that came from the private sector to make this thing something that we would have never believed could be a tool for us.

But with those tools come the responsibility that we make sure that they aren't used wrongly, criminally or intelligence gathering capabilities or taking privacy away from Americans.

So how do you do that?

And I think that's going to be our challenge.

I sit on the Energy and Commerce Committee and I sit on two subcommittees that deal in the area of telecommunications and networking and in all of the plants that go there.

We want to make sure, as it was, for instance, with social media, that Section 230 was there to make sure that First Amendment liberties were protected, that people could have access to use, that use it in various ways, that the that the platforms weren't anything but publishers.

They weren't supposed to be editors of what went on.

But to think that up a set and see a seated president of the United States could be thrown off a platform is is chilling.

No matter what you think of the president at the time, that's a problem.

And then to have an entity like TikTok and I know a lot of young people and adults, but primarily younger people enjoy that, use it, see that as absolutely important, but are willing to have their data used in ways that they're not even thinking of right now.

In the future, they may look back on and say, Oops, I wish I had known or I wish I had taken better care of what was in that platform about me.

And I think that's, again, what adults in the room, no matter what I thought of adults when I was their age or what they think of adults now that they're they're their age and I'm the age that they're concerned with.

There has to be considerations, especially when we come into an age of of clear opportunity for espionage.

A.I.

is another thing that can be a huge tool, but so many things could go wrong with it as well.

And I think we have to determine that it is a tool to be used for the future.

But where do we draw some lines so that we don't have criminal usage or intelligence gathering usage or even usage that makes people appear to who to to be who they are really not.

I mean, I, I'm concerned about what a I could do on a campaign of mine, what my face, image, image and likeness could be put together with art with with A.I., to make me see things and be a person that I'm not and used in a negative, in fact, criminal way.

So we take those deepfake videos.

Really?

Yeah.

Even experts have trouble telling the difference.

Yeah.

So, I mean, this is what our young people, I think we have to be creative in explaining it to younger citizens.

We can't just be seen as the ogre in the room, taking away all the fun and opportunity and not knowing at all what we're talking about.

You know, my grandkids know more about the practical use of it than I do.

I know more probably of the concerns that are there.

So if we can come together and understand that this is this is a platform that could have a huge opportunity, but unless we know who controls that and keeps the data and what they're going to do with the data, and we better find out before we let it expand.

And that was the reason why we had the hearing and my questioning about who controlled the data, who had access to it.

And if indeed, as it appears right now, I was lied to about the Chinese Communist Party having capability of seeing all of that data, and it's not just simply stored someplace in Virginia, then we better know about it and take action to make sure that this is this at least is information that can't be used in Chinese Communist Party propaganda, going to young minds and others alike and making a real problem for the freedom and opportunity of the United States.

Just very quickly, what kind of action could you take to prevent that?

Well, up to and including suspending the ability for TikTok to be used in the United States, I don't think it should come to that.

But I think there has to be a mechanism by which we say TikTok will be a platform totally owned by a total American company with no ties or capabilities of having ties with the CCP.

That would at least be what we ought to do.

How we do that with some sense of certainty that that is the case is what will be the challenge.

I you know, I'm I'm a libertarian enough to say that parents ought to be concerned about what their kids are using and find means by which they are capable of determining what their children are allowed to use and what they aren't.

But every parent also knows that their kids have friends who may be on platforms that their kids can access through their friends.

So it's it's it's not an easy solution.

And that's where character comes in.

That's where training our young people to be people of character and honesty, responsibility that has to come.

So it's an all encompassing American solution.

We've done it in the past, maybe not with data and big tech type stuff, but the same principles were there.

And I think we need to redouble our efforts within our schools, within our churches, within our families themselves, and within government.

To that, we would work toward a solution whereby we continue to expand our capabilities.

Innovative tools will come in and and go.

But ever expanding so that we grow, but we stay and we stay in control of it and not some entity that could use it in an insidious fashion against our people and our security of our nation.

When the last minute we have a time has gone far too quickly.

I want to pick up on a related point.

You mentioned schools and protecting kids.

You sponsored a bill called Protect Kids Act, which would require elementary and middle schools to obtain parental consent before changing a minor child's gender markers, pronouns or preferred name on any school form or allowing a child to change in sex based accommodations such as locker rooms or bathrooms.

Why did you think that's important and why not leave it to the states and local school boards?

Well, Elizabeth, the question I would ask you, which I'm not asking you, I'm asking rhetorically, why wouldn't we?

Why wouldn't we, if we're concerned about the cares and needs of kids?

And then I was talking about elementary and middle school students.

I was talking about high school students.

I might like to, but I think that's fraught with all sorts of other problems.

But children, true children, parents ought to be involved and has had some of my colleagues say.

But as a result of doing this, there will be kids that are abused by their parents.

And I'll say already there are some of these elementary and middle school students sadly being abused by their parents.

But overwhelmingly, we don't have kids of that age being abused by their parents.

The overwhelming number of parents want to be good parents.

They want to know what's going on in their children's lives.

They want to be part of those those decisions that their kids are make.

They want to be there to give counsel and direction.

They want to know maybe some challenge that these kids are having so they can at the very least find support through counseling social workers, psychotherapists, medical doctors, etc., whereby they can come to a solution that best works with their child.

Parents generally love their kids more than anybody else.

And so basically saying, listen, if a child comes to you in a public school and we spend a lot of money and time and policy on public schools, a lot more than I'd like to see us spend at the federal level.

But if that's the case, and we've got federal courts ruling in favor of letting kids make their own decisions about these life changing situations, then maybe it's time to step up and say, let's protect kids and give parents a notification.

If the parent says, I don't care if they want to change your pronoun, fine, that's their decision.

But a parent then ultimately says, No, I didn't never knew that.

I need to know that.

Thank you for telling me I'll work with Billy or Susie or Johnny or Nancy.

I'm going to find a means by which we can talk about this and come to a solution.

Again, elementary, middle school kids, some of them going through the most challenging formal experiences in their lives with things that they are being given in context that most of us never had.

And he ought to have parents in the mix of working with their kids again, their kids and the authorities ought to notify them of that.

All right.

Well, that will have to be the last word, because that's all the time we have for this week's episode of Politically Speaking.

I want to thank our guest, Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan's fifth Congressional District.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion, reminding you that it takes all of us to make democracy work.

We'll see you next time.

This WNIT local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.