9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23. This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third subbasement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, DC, and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello, and welcome to DSR's Words Matter. I'm David Rothkoff, your host, joined this week as every week by my partner in crime here, Norm Ornstein. How are you doing, Norm? About as well as could be expected, David, which is my answer every time we meet. Every single week for like 25 years now. And we are joined also by our friend, one of the people we really admire most in the United States Congress, Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. And frankly, if I may offer a personal opinion, one of the smartest and most thoughtful members of Congress I've ever met. Welcome, Adam. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. It's very kind of you to say, David. I appreciate that. And always enjoy our conversations. I always learn a lot from them as well. So thank you. It's a two-way street. And I'm going to start with a hard question, and then Norm can ask you easier questions. What's going on, Adam? Yeah. All right. Well, here's what's going on. I mean, you've got the whole two big things. One, Trump is not as easily being able to achieve his aims in Iran as he had hoped. And he's trying to figure out what to do about that. And that has all kinds of danger in it. And then here in Congress, we have this battle over the funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Department of Homeland Security has about a $65 billion budget, takes in a lot of different things, but it funds immigration enforcement through ICE and through the border patrol. We Democrats have a major problem with the way Trump is doing immigration enforcement, and we want that reformed. But we Democrats also want to make sure that as we sort out this disagreement, we minimize the damage to the American people. So basically, we want to fund the other parts of the Department of Homeland Security. That's TSA, most famously, as we've seen all the lines at the airport, but Coast Guard, FEMA, and several other things. So we have long proposed, set aside ICE and border patrol and fund everything else. Well, John Thune finally agreed at 2.30 in the morning last night, and the Senate unanimously passed that bill to fund everything in DHS except for the ICE and border patrol portions of it. So we passed that, and now Mike Johnson has decided he doesn't want to pass that. He apparently wants the chaos in the airports to continue. So he has decided to try to come up with another plan. Right now, they're talking about doing a 60-day CR for all of DHS, which basically, here's a bipartisan agreement on the table to solve the airport problem. He won't take it. Instead, he wants to continue to engage in the partisan fight. Now that's going to come out. I don't know. They're talking in conference. If they do this, if they vote on something that is purely partisan, has already been rejecting, then go home for two weeks with our airports and chaos? I mean, not that. I mean, this Congress does not surprise me. Donald Trump does not surprise me. But that is shocking and unsurprising all at the same time, given the way Trump and Mike Johnson have been running this place for the last 14 months. Okay. Now, I want to turn it over to Norm, and I do think we want to focus a little more on the war in Iran. But let me ask you a follow-up question on the TSA matter. Yesterday, the president said that he could, by executive order, pay everybody at TSA, which I was a little surprised by and was wondering what your reaction was. Well, not legally, he can't. The appropriations process works the way the appropriations process works, which means Congress, we have to approve it. But he's done this over and over again in the last 14 months. Now, he's been routinely sued. Everybody has routinely had that spending blocked, or sorry, his decisions on that spending blocked. So, yeah, no, he can't legally do that. And he can't really effectively do that either in that our TSA agent's going to trust that. Are they going to believe that? So no, and again, I really want to emphasize we have a bipartisan solution just sitting on our desk over here in the House. All we got to do is pass it, Trump signs it, TSA is back being paid. But no, legally, he can't just use the United States Treasury as his own personal piggy bank to spend the money wherever he wants to. That's not legal, even though he has done it repeatedly in the last 14 months. Thank you for clarifying that, Norm. So a couple of points that follow on that. One is he is attempting this after 47 days, but of course he could have tried to do it 47 days ago. It's been pretty clear that through all of this, he's been holding TSA and all of these passengers and everybody else hostage. That's a really important point. And the way I describe it is, look, politics, you have disagreements. You have people in different positions. You try to resolve those. You don't just give in for the sake of giving in. But what I've always done, and most of my colleagues have always done, is you try to have those disagreements in a way that is least harmful to the country and everybody else. What takes the exact opposite approach? Anytime anyone disagrees with them, he wants to maximize the pain for everybody. He wants, I mean, they're literally running ads in airports using our taxpayer dollars blaming the Democrats for not funding TSA. So he's trying to seek political advantage. Instead of doing what has been on the table, as you pointed out for 47 days, pay TSA. We've agreed to that a long time ago, but he wants to ramp up the pain and then hopes that he can blame Democrats for causing it when the solution is right there for him to implement. We should also point out that those ads are utterly illegal. Yes, oh, totally. They're violations of the Hatch Act. But they get away with all this stuff. And that leads me to a follow-up question. And then I've got some other areas to explore. And as David said, we want to turn to the war a little bit. And that is, we have a Congress with a majority that's completely abdicated. Every one of its responsibilities, when they hear him say, I'm going to pay them unilaterally, instead of saying, no, that's Congress's job. We appropriate, not you. They say nothing. And they've said nothing about the war. What I want to ask you, Representative Smith, is, as you talk privately to your Republican colleagues, are they upset at all about this? Are they going along because they're along with those who are true believers and fully in the cult? Are the others just afraid to speak up? Or are they just all going along with this? Well, first of all, back to your earlier comment, I don't know that Trump is completely getting away with it. But I just wanted to point it out, his party has lost every single special election. The American public are saying, we don't like what you're doing. We'll see what happens in the midterm. So right now, his party is on pace to experience historic defeats because the people don't like it. Now, that's unsatisfying to me as it is to most people. I think he should be removed from office for blatantly ignoring the Constitution. But to your second point, Republicans won't do that. Look, I mean, there's all kinds of layers to the way the Republican Party has allowed Donald Trump to turn them into a Donald Trump cult. They are no longer a party of ideas. Whatever Trump says, they do. I mean, and the thing about it is, if he says one thing in the morning, and then he says the exact opposite a couple hours later, they think he's right both times. That's just the way they've chosen to do this. And the biggest reason is because, yes, they're afraid of him. He has been able to control the Republican Party to the point where if Trump goes after you in a primary 99 times out of 100, you lose. So they are afraid to cross him and they will contortion themselves in the most grotesque ways possible to justify doing whatever Trump wants, not to mention all the sycophantic sucking up. Like apparently Mike Johnson gave him some award yesterday. Yeah. It's like the American first award that he can put up there next to his FIFA Peace Prize. Yeah. It has become unbelievably pathetic when you watch the way they suck up to Trump. But I've worked for a lot of different presidents. And yes, by and large, you will give greater deference to a president of your party than you would to one of the opposite party. But every single Congress I've met in has challenged the president, even of their own party, to at least some degree. It won't do that with Trump. But I think it's because of fear and it's because they've simply decided to go along to get along. Yeah. They've learned about a whole bunch of different aspects about it when you talk to them in private, but they will never do anything to directly challenge Trump. To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know, there's no better place than right here on the DSR network. And there's no better way to enjoy the DSR network than by becoming a member. Members enjoying ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on signup at thedsrnetwork.com. That's code DSR26 at thedsrnetwork.com slash bye. Thank you and enjoy the show. I want to ask a question that maybe you haven't had because it's pretty new before we pivot to the war directly. That is Pete Hegseth reporting this morning that a number of military figures up for promotion to one star general, and he has thrown out the promotions for four, two African Americans, two women. I'd just like to have you reflect a little bit. This is a broader issue of blowing up all expertise in the executive branch. But this seems to me to be a step along with some of the other moves that he has made, demoting some officers and generals, promoting others that is deeply undermining our national security and destroying the military from within. So, discuss. That definitely seems to be a pattern in a plan within the Pentagon to a, demand loyalty and b, have a bias towards straight white men. That definitely has played out. That bias is unquestionable when you look. CQ Brown, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a black man, very qualified, led commands all over the place, he got ousted. They've ousted a lot of people on that. And also, when they went in and purged the library when they first got in, among other things, they got rid of a biography of Jackie Robinson. Someone wrote a great contrast, and I forget what defense library it was. You could walk into, you could find two copies of Mein Kampf, but they got rid of the biography of Jackie Robinson. They also, of course, purged all of the images. They removed the word gay from throughout the entire thing, which of course voided out all the images of the Enola Gay briefly, which obviously means something different. But yeah, they are waging a right wing cultural revolution within Congress, within the Pentagon, which is very focused on an ideology that comes pretty close to white Christian nationalism. You see it in a lot of the religious overtones of what they've said. And look, I come from the Seattle area. Part of my district is in Seattle. I think the left went entirely too far with their own cultural revolution of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and in a number of different directions. And fixing that and getting back to a more balanced approach, I'm in favor of. It's not what Heg Seth is doing. He's going all the way over to an extreme right wing agenda that at an absolute minimum is appeasing white Christian nationalism. And in some cases, it appears that it's actually leading the charge towards that approach. So it is deeply troubling, and you already correctly pointed out one big problem with it. It undermines the capability, because if you know you're being picked based on your ideology, not based on your capability, being picked based on your loyalty, not based on your talents, that undermines the effectiveness of the department. So also blind loyalty is a problem when you have president making decisions that he shouldn't be making, and lack of capability is a problem. And here we are with the president having launched now a war against Iran. We're approaching the one month mark with this war. And it's the least popular war at its inception that we've seen in the modern era from Americans. They don't want it. The president's base doesn't want it. And yet, it's a little bit like quicksand. I think he thought he could get in and get out like he did last summer, like he did in Venezuela. But every time he wriggles and moves, he sinks deeper in this. And I'm just wondering, from your perspective right now, what is your expectation about the next phases of this? He has said, let's not attack energy sites for two more weeks, but at the same time, he's moving units that are capable of going in and doing things like seizing Carg Island into the theater of operation, which sends mixed signals. How do you interpret the mixed signals? Two big parts to this. One, and it's directly connected to Norm's question just prior to that, is because loyalty is the test, the president ignored advice or didn't get the advice because people were afraid to tell him something he didn't want to hear. Because when you're talking about dealing with Iran, and Iran is without question a problem, their desire apparently to build up towards a nuclear weapon is a problem. Their ballistic missile program is a problem. Their support for terrorist proxies and their hostility in the region. It's a problem we've wrestled with certainly, well, for the last 47 years, but most distinctly in the last 15 as we learned about their nuclear program, and as Hezbollah at Hamas grew in power and they supported them. I've sat in briefings for 15 years at least now, having this conversation. What do you do about Iran? What's the military option? Most of those briefings were from the standpoint of, let's find something we can do because this is intolerable. How do we make it stop? How do we figure out how to deal with Iran? Every single one of those briefings said there really isn't a good military option for reasons that are now becoming clear in this war. There's three parts to it. If your goal is to degrade Iran's capability, which by the way, we've done a reasonably effective job of over the course of the last four months in terms of blowing up missiles and missile launchers and production capacity and all of that, Iran's capability has been reduced. But what benefit is that? Iran wasn't actually actively attacking anybody. They were just building up weapons, supporting proxy forces, sort of a low grade thing. Have you really degraded their capability to such a degree that they're going to change that behavior and be less of a problem? I have yet to see anything from the Pentagon that shows us that. They can show you, we blew up this many missiles, we blew up this many launchers, but how does that fundamentally change the role that Iran plays in the Middle East? Second thing is, okay, if you say that, say, well, we are going to fundamentally change Iran's role in the Middle East because we are going to break them this time, which is sort of kind of floated out there or something that Trump thinks he's going to do. What that means is either regime change, either these guys are gone and a whole new group of Iranians are in who will change all of this, or whoever's left, they will be sufficiently beaten down that they will acquiesce to our demands. They will abandon their nuclear program. They will abandon their ballistic missile program. They will abandon support for proxy forces. The problem with that is, how are you going to accomplish that? What militarily are you going to do? Because Iran has not been as well. It's not just one guy at the top and then Delcy Rodriguez waiting in the wings. This is a layered, layered, deep, deep Iranian regime that over 47 years has built up all manner of political, military, religious structures. They're not dependent upon one person or even two or three dozen people. They're dug in deep and hard to dislodge. They have a million militiamen. They have the IRGC. Also, they have an ideology that doesn't mind suffering or even dying. How are you going to break them? The military conclusion was, you're not, which is why you shouldn't try. Then there's the third piece of this. You could say, okay, even if you don't break them, degrading them gets you something. It does. Even the 12-day war that Israel waged against Iran, and that we participated in for one brief raid, that weakened them. That did accomplish something. The full-scale war in the Middle East that Donald Trump launched comes with costs. That was always what was discussed when we were talking about why this wasn't such a good idea. First of all, you'd be placing US service members at risk. We have a dozen bases spread out across, I don't know, six, seven countries in the Middle East. One of them would be instantly targets. We've seen 13 service members killed as a result. We've seen over 300 wounded as a result. You would also take a major part of the global economy and throw it into chaos. That's oil, certainly. It's also fertilizer, by the way. People underestimate the importance of fertilizer, but that's starting to be a major problem. You have a huge increase in gas prices. You are jeopardizing a huge portion of the economy that's driving up costs everywhere. You have destabilized the entire Middle East. Are you really any closer to the goal of having broken Iran at this point than you were 47 days ago? No, you're really not. Now you have degraded them, but they're not close to breaking, which brings us to your point. What do you do now? Is there a way to escalate this that will break them? There's only two options on that front. I guess you can keep bombing, but everyone agrees that that alone isn't going to do it. Then you've got ground troops. What are the ground troops going to do? Iran is three times the size of Iraq. I forget. It was somewhere around 150,000, 200,000 troops that we sent in Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. I don't think even if we decided militarily, I mean, remember, Saddam Hussein spent eight years fighting Iran, and they didn't give up then either. I don't even know that that's a viable option. Is there something short of that we could do? We drop some ODAs and a couple of thousand ground troops somewhere and get a choke point on Iran. I don't see anything on that front. Then the second thing is we could go scorched earth and just try to destroy their energy infrastructure, destroy everything. One, we've said that we won't fight war that way because that is a war on the civilian population, not the military population. Two, it might undermine any effort to try and change the regime because now you've united the people against the common enemy that's basically trying to blow them up. That is the choice that Donald Trump faces right now, except that he started a war that really didn't accomplish what he'd hoped to accomplish and ended or doubled down under the hope that maybe something can be done that will accomplish those goals, despite the fact that again, any intelligent person looking at that is going to conclude that it wouldn't work. Mountains blooming at Starbucks. A new season calls for new discoveries like our iced uber vanilla matcha latte. Smooth, creamy and nutty, balanced with notes of vanilla. It's a treat for the eyes too, with vibrant lilac hues to brighten your spring mood. Hot or iced, there are so many ways to love this stunning serve. Uber vanilla, pouring now at Starbucks. Subject to availability while stocks last. So you want to start a business. You might think you need a team of people and fancy text kills, but you don't. You just need GoDaddyAero. I'm Walton Goggins and as an actor, I'm an expert in looking like I know what I'm doing. GoDaddyAero uses AI to create everything you need to grow a business. It'll make you a unique logo. It'll create a custom website. It'll write social posts for you and even set you up with a social media calendar. It started at godaddy.com slash aero. That's godaddy.com slash A-I-R-O. Let me follow up in a couple of ways. With Norm, we've got five minutes. Okay. Because I think it's important to follow up here. We see reports this morning that Iran is exploring closing another avenue on the Red Sea by using its Houthi friends. So they have more weapons at their disposal to disrupt the international economy and the oil fertilizer and helium exports. But what we also know is that American aims and Israeli aims may be very different. So my question is this. Let's say that Trump basically just decides that he is going to declare victory, say he's worked out a deal with the Iranians, pull out and hope that they will reopen the Straits of Hormuz. But Bibi Netanyahu and his compatriots have a different idea and continue to go after the Iranians. Do you see any expectation that the U.S. and Israel will act in concert here with all these bad options? I mean, I think it's a problem. The expectation would be, hey, we're in this together. Let's not screw everything up. But Israel has operated on their own. So yes, that's a second layer to the problem. Look, at this point, there's no great option. Even if Trump does what I think he ought to do, which is tries to find a way out of this, get an off ramp as quickly as possible, the Red Sea and the Straits of Hormuz will be under threat. And that's important. We did this three-month campaign a year, almost a year ago now. And Yemen did back off at that point and stop directly attacking shipping going through the Red Sea. But shipping going through the Red Sea has only increased by a trickle. It's nowhere near what it used to be, which is a major problem for Egypt right now because they depend on Suez Canal revenue. But the commercial industry is like, OK, the Houthis say they're not shooting at us now. I don't want to be their first ship when they change their mind. OK? It's too unstable. We're not going there. I don't have a vision now for how that changes in the Straits of Hormuz. Iran has made it clear that they will hold the Straits of Hormuz under threat. So commercial shipping companies are going to see their costs skyrocket in terms of insurance, even if they dare to go through that region. And yeah, if you really want to stop the war and get to some kind of agreement, the only way to open the Straits of Hormuz back up is if Iran very clearly agrees to do it and people have confidence that there is a lasting peace. Israel has to be part of that conversation. The reason the Houthis started attacking the Red Sea was because of what Israel was doing in Gaza. So unless we get Israel and the US on the same page, it's going to be difficult. And let me just say, Israel is really in a dangerous place right now. I mean, I understand the threats they face. And they want to weaken Amos and Hezbollah. Assad was a problem. Iran was a problem. They've really taken care of all of that. But what they're not doing is they're not building a future in Lebanon, in Syria, in Gaza. You can't just keep bombing. At some point, you have to build an alternative. And there are opportunities. I think Israel continuing to fight this war is creating more enemies, maintaining the chaos. And it makes the offer amp more difficult without question. So basically, it sounds to me as we're wrapping up here like there are no good options in your words. And so having started this war, you know, once he started it, you know, cliche, but wars are easy to start than they are to end. There's no great. Right. What that means, ultimately, if somebody were giving him any advice he'd listen to. Is that he's got to take the least bad option. And again, David, I really want to emphasize this isn't me playing Nostradamus here. Okay. This was laid out in epic detail across multiple administrations, dozens of senior military leadership, countless members of Congress. We've been having this conversation for 15 years. This wasn't just predictable. It was predicted over and over and over again. And that's part of Trump. Trump's like, he doesn't care. You know, he trusts his gut and his bones, basically. And we're paying the price for that rather questionable approach to leadership. And no question about it. Well, look, Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. This is super useful. We will get it out there immediately because we know our listeners want to hear this and hear it from somebody with your perspective. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Norm. Thanks, everybody. We'll be on this each and every day going forward. Hope to see you again soon. Representative Smith. And of course, use to Professor Ornstein. You too, David Rothkoff. Thank you very much. All right, everybody. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye. Thanks, David. Norm. Great to see you. Appreciate it. To see you too. Bye-bye. Thank you.
