Live from Virginia Wednesday morning on The John Fredericks Show – weekdays on WNTW AM 820/ FM 92.7 – Richmond, WJFN FM 100.5 – Central Virginia; WMPH AM 1010 / FM 100.1 / FM 96.9 (7-9 p.m.) Hampton Roads; WBRG AM 1050 / FM 105.1 – Lynchburg/Roanoke and weekdays 6-10 a.m. and 24/7 stream – host Fredericks welcomed (VA-8) Morgan Griffith to the show to discuss the southern border crisis, inflation, and the Putin blame game.
Fredericks: Joining us now, Morgan Griffith, Congressman for 8th district, Virginia. Congressman Griffith, thank you for being with us.
Griffith: Great to be with you, as always.
Fredericks: This invasion at the southern border, what is the Freedom Caucus doing? What’s McCarthy doing? What is the level of alarm in your caucus? Are you able to describe that?
Griffith: Well, it’s huge, particularly in the Freedom Caucus. It’s huge. The caucus is very concerned as well. But the Freedom Caucus, particularly Chip Roy … Chip is just beside himself because his district is down there, and he sees it.
But as he says, these folks are coming to every district in the country. They’re not just on the Texas border or the Arizona border, the New Mexico border.
And it’s interesting what we’re seeing, and we’re seeing some of the Democrats down there starting to change their tune a little bit, and they’re starting to talk about border security.
It’s a little late for them. You’ve got the Arizona senator, Mark Kelly, who’s really concerned about his race because of this, and he should be. He backed the wrong policies for too long. He should go.
Fredericks: I guess what I’m trying to understand is, you got Biden yesterday, basically blaming inflation on Putin, calling it the Putin price hikes, like we’re idiots.
You got Joe Manchin coming out and he said basically, hey, stop lying to the American people. You spent too much money. You want to spend another $5 trillion.
I had to stop that, otherwise, it would completely blow your head off. But he said he called out the Biden administration. He said, stop coming on TV and lying to the American people. This has nothing to do with the war. That’s only got a small piece of it.
You’ve got to come clean and tell Americans how this is devastating them, what’s causing it and what you’re going to do about it instead of blaming it on Putin. This is what Manchin said. I guess what I’m trying to get a feel of is the sense of urgency in your caucus. Does that make sense? Does my question make sense?
Griffith: Yes, it does make sense. There is a sense of urgency. I think we’re all very concerned and very worried, and we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to be able to do when we take control next year. But right now we don’t have the votes.
They keep bringing up bills to send over to the Senate they know aren’t going to pass. This is Nancy Pelosi’s tactic. We had a week a couple of weeks ago, we were there for five days in a row and they didn’t have enough bills.
So there were a couple of days in there where we just voted on a rule to take up the bill for the next day. That was our big action of the day. It’s that kind of stuff that drives you crazy. But until we get a majority in the House, we can’t take any affirmative action.
Now, when we get a majority, we still have to deal with the Senate and a president, who doesn’t understand these issues, who doesn’t want to understand these issues, and who may not be able to understand these issues.
But the bottom line is we can start doing some affirmative things after we get control. And just so everybody knows, it’s not just after the election, we win the election in early November, we have to wait until November and December before we can actually get to take any affirmative action on behalf of the American people.
What we can do in the meantime is try to get more people like Manchin to stop some of these crazy spending bills. And they keep bringing them up, and they keep talking about bringing more.
Fredericks: How can your Democratic colleagues in there, Morgan, when you’re looking at maybe 30,000 people a day coming across the border illegally, you’ve got Secretary Mayorkas saying, well, we’re not going to do anything to stop them, but our goal is to be sure that they’re comfortable or something, or they’re taken care of.
They have a hot cup of coffee, a cold soft drink, an iPhone, a plane ticket, and cash in a duffel bag or something. Whatever nonsense he’s spewing out, the guy should be impeached, by the way. So you got that going on. You’ve got inflation.
I got 8.5 percent again in March, the highest ever in almost five decades. That’s raging. The average cost of a house has gone up dramatically as interest rates rise.
I had Mark Livingstone on the other day on my TV show. He said a $350,000 home, four months ago to today, the mortgage went up by $400. People just can’t afford that. Grocery prices are up.
Gas prices are up no end in sight. And you got your Democratic colleagues running around in there trying to spend more money that we don’t have.
That’s only going to drive it further. Like, did these guys ever do a math class or take ECO101? I’m just trying to figure out what is their answer when you ask them how is this going to help?
Griffith: A lot of them have bought into these new modern economic policies that say we can continue to spend. History shows that’s false, but a lot of them believe, oh, it’s no problem. I don’t know why they don’t understand.
It is very frustrating when you see intelligent people who don’t understand. You got some who aren’t that capable and you can kind of guess why they don’t understand.
But then you’ve got some people who really ought to know better, and they just don’t seem to understand the urgency that we have to start figuring out how we’re going to deal with these issues. Instead of dealing with it, as Manchin said, instead of tackling the tough issues, they want to blame it all on Putin.
And we did a little tweet yesterday where we specifically said I’m not going to send out we have the highest inflation every people will buy into “maybe this has to do with Putin in the Ukraine war.”
So we made sure in our tweet that we had January and February in there as well, which was well before the war. Putin had nothing to do with the highest inflation in January which was topped by the highest inflation in February and then we get just a few points more in March, that’s not Putin. That’s Biden.
Listen to the full interview:
