Dan Crenshaw Disagrees with Bernie Sanders About Lobbyists | Joe Rogan

One of the things he said that he disagreed with Bernie on was lobbyists. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I disagree with his notion that everything is attributable to some kind of corporate greed and therefore lobbyists. It's just not the source of our problems. It contributes to it in some ways for sure. I mean, these are selfish actors. They have a role, right? They're advocating for a specific thing. I think politicians like to point to them as like the nia, the boogeyman. Let's just blame them for everything. That has not been my experience. It has not been my experience at these lobbyists of any kind of excessive control over politicians. I just don't see that. Okay. A corporate pack can give you $5,000. That's it. I mean, this is not in no way, shape or form can they buy anybody off. It's also a very transparent form of doing things. There's this other talking point that it's all dark money. That's just not true. A corporate pack is a group of people who work for a corporation. They pull their money together. They can't use company profits. Just be clear. It's just personal money and they have limits on what they can donate to that own pack. And then they use that to advocate for whatever is important to that business. And I tell people, where do you work? I'll ask you, what industry are you in? They'll give me whatever industry. And I'll say, you definitely have a pack lobbying for you on Capitol Hill. All right. And they'll just point out bills. They'll say, listen, this is problematic in this one. This would hurt our workers. This would do this and put us out of business. Like don't do that. That's it. And so, yeah, they're selfish actors. Don't get me wrong. This is, but they're advocating for their thing. But that's also our democracy. Individuals can donate more. No. So an individual cap is $2,800 to a campaign. And then a couple, like you and your wife, can double that. Okay. So it's basically the same as a pack. It's basically the same. It's only $5,000-ish. That's the maximum. That is the maximum. But there's also influence that comes with that on top of financial. There's also influence in terms of just cronyism and people reciprocating and getting along with each other and working, establishing long-term relationships where they agree on things and they make deals. And they make deals that might not necessarily be in the best interests of people. But deals in terms of what businesses get subsidies, what businesses don't get subsidies, what things get negotiated, what don't. Here's a perfect example. That's exactly why I think we should have a less powerful government that can't be bought off like that. Yes. You know, if you want government, because cronyism certainly happens, right? And they'll say, listen, and who can lobby? The bigger companies. So there's some agreement here. But I think there's somewhat a misunderstanding of what's really happening. So, yeah, a big business can lobby. And then the last for more regulation. And then who does that really hurt? It hurts their smaller competitors. So the answer is actually, who's at fault here? It's the fact that government's trying to excessively regulate so much. And it creates a situation where there's no longer competition. Okay. And then that's a real problem. You know, that excessive influence, though, again, it's not something I've seen. Because there's a lot of competition for influence. Anybody can come to your office and they all disagree, right? There's all these different interests that actually compete with one another. And then they represent different interests. So it's not self-evident to me that that influence is certainly not bought. And I don't necessarily believe it's excessive either. It's just not what I've seen. Maybe they just don't come to me. Well, I think it was Northwestern University did a study recently where they showed the public support for policies and public support for bills and how low the public support is in comparison to things that get passed. And how when the public, it was things that the public absolutely wanted, like across the board, had something in the range of a 30% chance of getting passed through. Whereas there's many things that the public absolutely did not want across the board also had a 30% chance of getting through. And they were talking about the various influences that lead to these policies getting passed. Now the argument is that you're electing representatives, those representatives don't do you justice and pass bills and enact policies that would help your community and help you, then you elect them out of office. But the damage gets done while they're there. And the idea is that these people would then go on from there once they've established that influence. And once they've helped these people get jobs in the corporate sector, get jobs that represent what they've done for those corporations while they were a representative supposedly of the people. Yeah, I think that's a... you have to really dig into like what issue they're talking about and what issues not supported by the public. I mean, that's a... you'd have to unpack those statistics, I think, to really understand what's happening there. But I think that's too cynical of a way to look at politicians. I just don't feel that way about my colleagues, on the left or the right. How long have you been a congressman? Seven months. So I just... Maybe it's like nine months in, they start coming to you. Maybe. No, we meet with them. It's just like they don't have this influence. They're not... I mean, listen, they present one, they generally meet with a lobbyist that they already agree with you. And they're generally bringing up very minute things that you just would never know about if they didn't bring that to you. Well, there's some bills that get passed like that don't... Like here's one, right? Medicaid spends billions of dollars on drugs for the elderly and people that can't afford them, billions of dollars. But by law, the government's not allowed to negotiate the price of those drugs. Okay. So the price negotiations... How did that happen? Well, how did it happen? It's... Well, it was never a thing to begin with. So there's an argument to be made that the government should be able to negotiate prices, right? The question is, what is the price? And the other thing you have to point out is there's already a strong force against the pharmaceutical industry, which is the insurance companies. Because they have an interest in making sure that price is as low as possible. They're fighting all the time against the pharmaceutical companies. In the healthcare industry, all of these groups are often pitted against each other. And then as politicians, we kind of look at all of them and we say, all right, what are your arguments? What are your arguments? Is what you're saying really make sense? And then we have to make those decisions based on the overall good, but you're going to piss everybody off when you do that. Especially with healthcare, because a lot of these groups are pitted against each other. So you've got insurance already pitted against pharmacy. And then it becomes a pretty good question, like what is government's role there? Because when I first looked at this problem, I said, yeah, yeah, just negotiate. Well, that makes sense. I learned a lot more. I learned a lot more. And it's not because I met with any lobbyists. It has nothing to do with that. It's because I meet with healthcare professionals and experts who know this issue really well and economists who, and it's very far from self-evident that this would work and it's far from self-evident that would be beneficial at all and actually make a difference. You know, when we look at the differences in healthcare spending between us and other countries, the drug prices actually have very little to do with that. They're able to negotiate those, but they also get last choice for medicine. Okay. When you look at Great Britain and Canada, they're not getting the premier new drugs like we have in the United States. We get screwed as Americans because the patent laws are not enforced in these other countries. So our pharmaceutical companies, they immediately get ripped off in other countries. And that's a problem. That should be something we fix. They get ripped off in that they've done the research to create these drugs and these other companies in other countries to just copy these drugs. They make generics, yep. Because they have socialized medicine and their obligation is to provide medicine to the people. So their obligation is to, they don't care about these copyrights. They just care about getting medicine to the people. Now some people would argue that that is in favor of the population, in favor of the people that need healthcare. I would argue it's not sustainable though. It might make it feel good, but it's not going to do good in the long run because it would be- But if they still profit, even if they're- Well, they're having a, they're profiting because they're charging Ameri- Well, America's basically paying for this. Right. Okay. Which is why it's important for like trade agreements to say, hey, you guys have to enforce the same patent laws that we have. Otherwise, this is not sustainable situation. Well, that's- Especially you don't make a profit, right? Right. And that's not fair for Americans. So the new NAFTA deal was negotiated this way, the USMCA, addressing some of these concerns, for instance. And that's the right thing to do. You have to align incentives when you're talking about any policy. We have to dig a few layers. It's never as simple as Bernie Sanders says it is. It never is. He always makes it out to be so simple. It's greed. Everything is attributable to greed. Everything is attributable to 1%. They own you, they own the lobbyists, they own all this. Listen, there's elements of truth in all of that. But my point is, it's just not the overarching thing. It's new art. There's so much more complexities to that. And we have to have those conversations. And instead, what we see is just very extreme talking points. First of all, very extreme interpretations of the actual problem, and therefore, leading to very extreme solutions to that problem.