I don't call it a job. I don't know what it is. This enterprise, this vocation, this calling. Because sometimes in a way you don't choose it. You can't help yourself, right? Let's face it, I know everybody thinks it's glamorous, and some people actually think it's fun. It's neither one of those things, in my opinion.

Welcome back to the Kevin Roberts Show. We often, perhaps most often, record this show inside The Heritage Foundation, but it's always a treat when we're able to come over to the house side of the Capitol Hill and visit with a man or woman who's making the difference. I am happy to be here with someone you probably know. You've probably seen Congressman Scott Perry, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, from the great state of Pennsylvania, because he is fearless when it comes to every public policy issue. This is why we've become friends, and he's also a long time Fair to the Heritage. Scott Perry, thanks for making time.

Well, I am honored, and I'm thrilled to be on the Doctor President Kevin Roberts' show. It's awesome.

A military guy would get his titles right. I'm grateful for that. Brigadier General.

Scott Perry? Which one are we selecting today for you? -keven is this guy. Kevin, all right.

I appreciate that. I'll tell you what my wife says when I jokingly say, Michelle, you need to refer to me as Dr. Roberts. Can't repeat that inside the office of the congressman.

You know the drill.

We're going to get to some serious stuff, Scott. And all kidding and sarcasm aside, it's important to cover with you. You're a humble guy, a servant of this country, but you're also a guy in spite of that humility who has a lot of wisdom about what needs to happen. And so for our audience, that's where we're going. But I gave you the cue a few minutes ago. We're going to talk a little bit about your story. I thought I'd gotten to know you some in my two years in heritage, and I didn't know until today that you're the son of Colombian immigrants.

Yeah, my mother is Colombian. I don't know my father. Okay. I think about that, and it was a choice that I made very, I guess, directly. I was a state representative. This seat opened up and I didn't ever… I never expected to be a state representative. I never expected to run for anything. We had a little baby and we just had another little baby. I was building a house. I was finishing a master's degree and we were living in this little place with our youngest daughter in the bedroom with us at night, so nobody gets any sleep. I remember it was my turn to get up at night at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and feed her. I was right in the middle of a couple of days of making this decision whether I was going to run for Congress or not. I hadn't ever contemplated anything like this. I was holding this little baby and the lights very dim. It's middle of night, and you're night late on. I'm thinking, I want to be here for my child. I don't know my father, and I'm not going to have that for my children.

But I also want this country to be here for my kid. That's tough, right? How do you- You're going to wrestle with that. Yeah. Because this, I don't call it a job, I don't know what it is. This enterprise, this vocation, this calling. Because sometimes in a way you don't choose that you can't help yourself, right? Let's face it, It know everybody thinks it's glamorous, and some people actually think it's fun. It's neither one of those things, in my opinion, but you get called to it. It takes you away from your family. I'm not complaining, I made the choice. But just like a lot of other things, whether you're a truck driver or a member of Congress, you're making decisions, you're making choices. We all make decisions. You're not going to be there for cross country meets. You're not going to be there for the play. You're not going to be there for your wedding anniversary. You're just not going to be there. Believe it or not, children and spouses don't love all that. They don't love it.

They're humans and they like you home. Yeah. You didn't say all of that for this comment, but thank you. And I often when I'm actually, hopefully every time I'm here with members of the House or Senate, regardless of what we're talking about, whether there's 100 % alignment like there is between you and me or AD or whatever, I always say thank you because of what you just said. And I think for people in this audience, whether they're watching or listening to hear that is really important. I know they don't hear a complaint in there. They just hear- No, no complaints. -a real heavy dose of reality, right? And that's always been true about people who are serving in Congress. But it's particularly true right now. When mostly figuratively, but in some cases literally, the country is on fire and the world's going to hell in a hand basket. And we're going to get into the policy aspects of that. But another really important part of your biography that's important for the audience to know is that you're a 40 plus year veteran of the armed services? A helicopter pilot?

Being in the military was a great privilege to me, and it taught me a lot, it offered me a lot. And I got to do things that people only dream of, believe it or not. And it really is true. And I get to fly almost every single rotary wing helicopter, rotary wing aircraft in the army inventory over 38 and a half years in the military. And I miss flying, but I'm onto something else now. But I don't have anything but praise for what the military can offer young people or maybe better put, and I sadly say the military I joined.

Why do you say that?

Military has changed. And at the end of my career, I went to my boss and said it's time for me to go. And he said, Well, we're not ready for you to go yet. And I said, I'm going. When you belong to a business, a family, an organization like the military, you reflect it, but it also reflects you. And unfortunately, I got in when I was 18 and that 38 and a half years later, it didn't reflect a lot of the values that I showed up with.

Do you think there's still time for members of Congress to effect change to get the military as it is now back to like the military that you joined?

Of course, I wouldn't be here if I didn't think we couldn't solve these problems. But I would say that if you think we're going to solve them in one election cycle for Congress, two years or one presidential cycle, unfortunately, that's not... I don't think that's really possible. This is now a long road to get to where we need to be.

So in there is a heavy dose of reality that even if we win, Conservatives win in 2024 and we all pat ourselves on the back, you're saying, No, we need to be really persistent for many years, right?

Yeah. We have to have a long winning streak and we have to have a view towards the long goals, long term goals, work towards them. But if we think that we're going to solve this nation's and the world's problems in one election cycle, whether it's a congressional, a Senate, or a presidential one, I think we're missing the market. We've got a lot of work to do. And it's years and decades of neglect. If you neglect your family and your relationship with your spouse or your business and operating it, things are going to decay. And we have neglected them. That's just a sad truth. Not every person, not every day, but collectively, we have neglected our wonderful country. And this is what you get when you're neglected.

So over your tenure here in Congress, you've been here.

10, 11 years? Yeah, 10 years.

It's amazing. And you're still a young guy.

I wish I were young. You're the young guy here.

I don't know about that. But over that time, what changed the most in the chamber?

I've seen some changes, but they've been dramatic in the last nine months or so. Not a lot changed for the most of the time I've been here. We changed a couple of people around, but the operation stayed generally the same and you see things over time. But this place is really spring... It's a default setting. It's spring-loaded to go back exactly to non-confrontational. Washington, DC runs this... When I say Washington, DC, I'm not talking about members, but there's a certain amount of that. But this institution and everything around it. And I think the difference is that there's this feeling, this perception that the American people are running Washington, DC. They're not. That's the problem. And so the biggest changes I have seen have occurred mostly this year, but there were other ones. I mean, it started with the Freedom Caucus for me, and I became a member of what I think called the Republican Study Committee, but I realized pretty quickly it wasn't going to do anything. And that's because it was taken over by this town. It originally started out to do something, but it was taken over by the town. So the Freedom Caucus started, but it was the voting against your own leadership, really voting against them.

And then the departure of Speaker Boehringer, not because he decided to hang it up, we helped him. We helped him out. It was just his time to go. And that started this realization that the voice of the American people through their representatives can be heard here. It comes at a huge cost. It's incredibly difficult. It's really uncomfortable, but it can happen if you're committed to it. And so we've been informed over that period of time. And like you said, I've been here now for a little while and longer than when I started out than I thought I would be. I don't really know if I thought I'd be here for 10 years, but it's taken this amount of time to get to the point where some of these foundational changes could actually take place.

Was there, on that point, was there an issue when you were sitting down years ago weighing, spending more time at home, or running for Congress? Was there a policy issue that really motivated you to come into Congress?

I think it was like most Americans that watched the news in the evening say a policy issue. The world was on fire. You're like, How can this be so screwed up? Can't anybody do anything? Wouldn't anybody do anything? And then, like I said, this window of opportunity opened up the good Lord you think. Is this a blessing or a curse? I'm not sure. But you think that maybe you're the person that can make the change. And I think every member that comes here believes that. I think that's true. But no, it was just the combination of everything that seemed like it was going the wrong way. And you said, Well, nobody ever says what I think, so why don't I go say what I think? Because I know a bunch of other people here that think the same thing.

So if you had your way today, as we sit here, it's late 2023, and we're spending way too much money. We don't have any strategic clarity about Ukraine as much as we want them to win. Obviously, Israel under assault, which is a way of assaulting Western civilization. Concerns, which I know you share with us at Heritage about China's sabre-ratling toward Taiwan, but really toward the rest of the world. If I gave you a magic wand and you could wave it, say, two or three times. I mean, this really is magic wand thinking, which I know we're not accustomed to.

Just get two or three times. This is like Genie in the bottle thing. And you can't wish for the another three wishes on your-It's.

Two.

Or.

Three for you to say, say, This is how we fix it. Oh, my goodness.

Does that my magic wand include things that the legislature can't fix? We can't fix culture. It's a magic wand.

Okay, so- And I love where you're going with that.

If I could, yeah, if I could, I think all the other problems, spending China and wanting to take over the world and the wars around the country or around the world and our involvement in them, all those things are solved with a citizenry, with a population that understands what their place is, not only in their personal life, which is important. Get up out of bed in the morning, make your bed, get dressed, and go to work with a good attitude, whatever your work is. And I worked in sewers. I've done a lot of different things. Be the best at it and smile through it and get after it. I think that would be number one is just changing America to understand what their place is and what this government is about and what it's not about. It's not about fixing all your problems. We just had arguments on the floor today, and my good colleague from the other side of the aisle said, You're out there on your own. I can't tell whether I'm pumping gas or diesel. I depend on the government to do that. And he's just using that as an example. I pump gas.

That's what I did at Ray Zexxon. I did that, among other things. I know gas from diesel from kerocene. And if I don't, maybe that's something I should know, I don't need the government. They act like we can't do anything without the government. So if I could change anything, I would change… I don't know what the right time frame was, but it seems to me that somewhere I missed the greatest generation. I should have been born. That's what people understood their place in the world and in their family and in their community and in their country. That would be number one, I think. And if I could do number one, number two, three, and they would all happen because they would say, Well, this is crazy. Why are any of us doing this? We wouldn't argue about, Are you a man or a woman? And should your daughter be showering with my son in the school? We wouldn't even have that discussion, right? Because we know what that is. That's no longer a point of interest. We can deal with things that are real.

So in other words, if, as most of us, at least on the political right want, we want the government out of the way. The best way for us to do that to effect that change is to attend to our own, not just personal responsibility, but obligations. I mean, to our family members, to our friends, to our communities, and to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps and lend a hand without government saying you ought to go lend a hand.

You just do that because it's the right thing to do. I'm not saying the world was perfect back then. Like I said, my father, I guess, is probably somewhere just after the greatest generation. I don't know him, but obviously didn't work out so well, and he abandoned me and my brother as little kids, and I don't know him, and that's not perfect. I'm not saying the world was perfect, but I think that generally speaking, America, as a culture, as a population, as a people, understood what was right and what was wrong in the world and what made America the greatest country on the planet. And if we could just reinvigorate that and reinstill that and recreate that, if that could be recreated, not that we can recreate it, but that revival of sorts and the other revival as well, which really, I think, feeds into, it really informs the citizen revival, but the revival of believing in something someone bigger than yourself, a creator that has all this figured out, right?

Each of those is a crisis, right? I'm really grateful that you put your own work as a member of Congress in such great perspective. For what it's worth, I think that's the greatest answer to the magic wand question I've ever got. It's so real. It's also the best way to use the magic wand, which is to change culture and to get Americans back to what Americans were doing for so many years, up until like 20 or 25 years ago. And what I also love about it is, and this is coming from the Heritage Foundation, where our lane is public policy, right? Right. That we tell people, as much as we might have a little bit of influence on public policy, we would love to have even more influence on society and culture.

We can make all the laws that we want to here. Let's just say everything works out the way I want it to. We pass all these bills and then they become law. The President signs them for whatever he just has an epiphany and says, Oh, my, I'm going to do what the good Lord wants to do here, and I'm going to sign it. It's not going to change people's viewpoints about what's important to them culturally. And if marriage is irrelevant to them, you can throw that away. If family can be thrown away, if you can abandon your children, if you can abandon your responsibilities, if you don't care to do better for yourself, which does better for your community to clean up your own home and your own neighborhood, we can't make you do that. That's innate. That comes from human nature. But it's also learned. If we learn to accept those things and start accepting them, they become acceptable.

Let's go from the really important, what you've just been talking about, to the importance. Butsometimes mundane, although this year, the exciting, and that is legislative priorities in the House of Representatives. The most common question I've gotten as I traveled the country the last few months from Heritage Friends is, What does Congress need to do to get back on track? Oh, my goodness. That's a really big question. It is. But as the Chairman of the Freedom Caucus, I know firsthand you've thought about this, you speak about it. What are some steps that need to happen if you and your colleagues in the Freedom.

Caucus have your way? Some steps.

Are pretty- The.

Legislative steps. Yeah, big steps, but pretty simple. Pass a budget. This is how much money we're going to spend this year of yours. This is how much, and in the context of how much we don't have much money, we're taking in five trillion, we're spending 7.2%. So that's a problem because we don't have pass a budget. No one knows, no one cares. Pass a budget that we actually care about that we can achieve, and then pass these 12 separate spending bills so that you can see how I voted on this piece of legislation. So you can say, I don't know if you should be here anymore. You seem to maybe have lost your way. Or look, you did a pretty good job here. And get away from this. It's all piled in here at one time. And I can say, Kevin, I didn't want to vote for that, but I had to get this one thing that was important to the country, and so I had to vote for all of that or shut the government down. So what was my choice? And so you don't know whether I voted for this other terrible. That all has to end.

That's the spending component. And then the other thing as a macro thing, is that there's just a few people in this operation that really run the show here. People have this illusion of representative government. Well, I voted for our guy and our gal, and they're great people, and they're up there or down there in Washington doing the hard work, and they're in the meetings, and they're getting these amendments. Sorry, that's not really how this goes. I mean, it's getting better, right? We didn't have an amendment on the floor for seven years. People say, Well, what does that matter? If I'm not on a committee that's moving a piece of legislation that affects you and I'm your representative, where's your voice? My only chance is to have an amendment. It's going to fail, more than likely, but at least I get a voice. I always say I don't have to have my way, but I got to have a say on behalf of my constituents, my bosses. So structurally, and you're seeing some of that being broken now, the cartel, or you've seen some of that, anybody can do these jobs. They're not rocket science. And I will tell you, the last guy we had running this place, Speaker of the House, third in line to the presidency, as best I could tell, his experience in the business world, running an organization.

And by the way, seems to me the federal government is one of the, if not the largest organization on the planet. He ran like a sandwich shop when he was a young man. I'm not trying to disparage him, but a lot of people can do these jobs. It's not just a couple. This isn't high school popularity contest. This is running the country. And we need all these voices and we need all these ideas. And I remember when I first went to the State House, I sat next to a gentleman. This is my seat and there was a bill on the floor and he said, I'm not voting for that. That guy's a jerk. He didn't use the word jerk. He said something else. But I said, I think you're probably right, he is a jerk, but this is a good effort here. This is a good, worthy cause here. He wouldn't vote for it, and I voted for it. But that.

Attitude- It explains how things work or don't work.

Sometimes, right? Yeah. It's not personal for me. It's business. It's the business of running country. I might not agree with you. I might not even like you. Doesn't matter. If you're doing the right thing and the righteous thing, I should be for that.

So one more policy question, and that is on foreign policy. But at Heritage, we prefer to call national security because it puts the perspective in the right way. But you describe it how you would like. But the question is with all of these hotspots in the world, to say the least, how do you, as a member of Congress, as the Chairman of the Freedom Caucus, and as a veteran, figure out how to prioritize them? It would be nice if America could wield that military influence simultaneously. We lament that we can't. That's our assessment and heritage.

We lament that we can't, but at the same time, I'm drawn to what George Washington said about foreign entanglements, right? And also this thing about getting older, I don't know if you become wiser, but you seem to know more. You have more data points along the way. And I remember Desert Storm. I was a Reserve Corps. I was a guard, officer, pilot, but I wanted to go, so I signed up and volunteered, but they didn't take me. It didn't last long. The war was over, they didn't need any pilots, and we won. And that was great. But you come to find out that sometimes I trained for war and you want to go ply your trade. You want to go see if it works and do it. But you don't always have all the information and you're not sure all the information is accurate. So I'm much more circumspect about all of that right now. But at the same time, I think we have to be... We have to be mindful of the context. This isn't the 1940s anymore. This isn't the end of World War II. And there's a lot of technology has changed.

Our position in the world has changed culturally. We can't get people, we can't recruit people for the armed forces. And the ones that we can recruit and do recruit, many of them, they can't meet the standard. That's unfortunate to say, but it's reality. And if you're going to fight to the death, we need a certain mindset and we need a certain capability. I'm not sure that capability exists. Financially, we simply can't afford to do all the things. We have to make these choices. Do we want to pay for it? I deal with public transportation and infrastructure committee. So one of the things is all these public transit things. And I say to people, they lose money every year. They all lose money. And the problem is that somebody invented the airplane and the car. That's the problem. I'm not mad at them. It's not that I dislike them. There are better options, and I'm not saying they should go away, but we simply don't have the money for them and this. So which choice are we going to make? And while things around the world are in their interest, how we afford to deal with them, it makes a difference.

I don't want to get into a hot war with Iran, but at the same time, we could be making sure Iran gets the message, or Russia or China. China trades openly on our stock market, yet doesn't follow any of the rules of American companies. If we really want to say to China, Hey, we don't appreciate your behavior, we don't want to get in a war with you, but we're not going to let you do this anymore because it helps you and it hurts us. Why is.

That a.

Hard concept? It should just be so easy. Whether it's Iran, whether it's Russia, whether it's China, whether it's North Korea, we don't have to get in a shooting war to have the effect of letting the world know America is still here and we're just not putting up with certain things and we expect you to act right. But yet we won't do these things.

Do you think there's a quick follow-up? It seems to me just in the last several months that more of your colleagues in the House and in the Senate are arriving at that conclusion that, in fact, basically what you just said, this realism, it's not weakness, quite the opposite, actually. There's a lot of strength in what you said in that realism that that's really where national security needs to be moving forward.

We have… Everybody has limitations. You have limited resources, whether it's time, whether it's every single resource you have, there's a limit to it. I think that whether it's the financial circumstances that we are in or whether it's people are saying, Well, I'm not sending my sons and daughters over to this war. We don't even know what the mission is. Isn't that a reasonable question? We weren't attacked. I get it. When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor or when the terrorists attacked New York City, Washington, DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as it were, we understood we were at war, but Ukraine is at war. We want to help our friends there. We don't agree with Russia. We want to help our friends in Israel. We don't agree with Hamas and the terrorists. But there's a couple of different ways to do that, and sending our blood and treasure there isn't the only way to do it and achieve results. I think people realize that.

So I ask you one final question, because we're here in your office. I know you've got to get on to your next meeting.

And thanks for your time. No, it's actually that you're the guy that's the important one here.

Come on.

General Scott Perry. You're one of one in all of the world. I'm one of 435 here. So think about that.

Yeah, you're very kind. You're very kind. It's still the last question.

Okay.

This has been great. Hopefully, we could do this many times over the years. But it's a spin on the typical last question that I ask almost every guest, especially elected officials. And it's about legitimate hopefulness, not the hollow optimism that we sometimes hear from elected officials, not Scott Perry, but the real reasons for hopefulness. I know you travel the country and you go back home and you probably hear from your constituents, Scott, I want to have hope in the country, but I'm pretty discouraged by what's going on. How do you respond to Americans who in their gut, want to be hopeful about this great country, but what they see around them is not very hopeful?

I'm hopeful because I see the people that get elected and come and join the Freedom Caucus. And I will tell you, when I came to Congress, it wasn't too long after I remember we call it Flying Day. It's the day you come in for votes in the evening. I walk down to the House floor and you get a chill. You should get a chill. You're in the most important, deliberative body on the planet. I remember I was standing there, John Boehringer was the speaker, we were doing nothing meaningful. And I thought to myself, What am I doing here? I'm wasting my time. What is happening? But this group was getting together called the Freedom Caucus, and we were pursued by our leadership. We were literally hiding out in rooms talking where they couldn't find us. And I thought these guys and gals are like the founding fathers that hid out in the taverns in the low light against the biggest military on the planet, the Great Britain, right? The colonialism and all around. And look what they did. And I see the same spirit in some of the folks that come here, and they're nice and they're polite and they say, I'm not doing that.

They're nice about it. They'll smile. I'm not doing that. And so it gives me hope because to me, you need to be competent when you need to be here. You need to have conviction when you come here. This is what's lacking most of the time. You need to have some courage when you come here. You put those three things together, and I see them. Those folks are in the Freedom Caucus. I work around them all the time, and I feel so small around them because they were so bright and so courageous and so committed to saving this republic. And that's what makes me hopeful because I see there's a path.

Chairman Scott Perry, thanks for your time. Thanks for your own commitment, your own courage, your own patriotism, and your hopefulness.

I am hopeful. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you, Doctor President Kevin Roberts.

You got it. We'll do this again. Okay. I told you you'd enjoy this episode if you have not yet gotten to know Congressman Scott Perry. Now you do. And you need to follow him and the Freedom Caucus. And and just know that we're going to win some, we're going to lose some. But ultimately, we are going to take back this country because of what Scott said. Thanks for being part of this. Keep your chin up. We're going to win.

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