SCOOP: House Republicans discuss DOGE, MAHA, judicial reforms, and more in latest RSC podcast

THE LOWDOWN:

• A trio of House Republican women joined Rep. Mark Alford (R., Mo.) to discuss everything from DOGE’s successes to prison reform and the MAHA movement on the latest episode of the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Right to the Point podcast, obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter.

• While Alford, Harshbarger, Miller, and Greene had worked as a news anchor, pharmacist, farmer, and construction business owner, respectively, before being elected to Congress, they are now unified on some of the GOP’s top priorities. At the top of their list is Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R., Calif.) No Rogue Rulings Act.

• Harshbarger, who said she is supporting Issa’s bill, noted that judges “have their districts” and said judges are “supposed to be settling feuds within their district, but they want to supersede their authority.”

• Miller added that “our Constitution has designed our system to have three branches of government as a check on power.”

A trio of House Republican women joined Rep. Mark Alford (R., Mo.) to discuss everything from DOGE’s successes to prison reform and the MAHA movement on the latest episode of the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Right to the Point podcast, obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter.

Alford channeled the decades he spent as a reporter while moderating the conversation between Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), Mary Miller (R., Ill.), and Diana Harshbarger (R., Tenn.). All four are members of the RSC, and all four had lengthy careers in the private sector before ascending to Congress.

Harshbarger even joked that if she could pass any bill, it would be one that says that “you could not run for Congress if you hadn't worked a real job or run a successful business, period.”

“You can't be on an episode of DC Housewives and be up here. That's not a real job,” Harshbarger said. “[Rep.] Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas) thinks it is.”

Crockett was a frequent topic of mockery by the Republicans. She infamously got into a tiff with Greene, who said that Crockett “is my favorite Democrat right now. Jasmine for President!”

When Greene and Crockett aren’t feuding on the full Oversight Committee, the former is chairing the committee’s DOGE Subcommittee, which she chairs — and her experience suggests that Democrats are miscalculating in attacking Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts.

“DOGE is the most exciting thing,” she said. “The American people are fired up about it, and it's so obvious; we have $36 trillion in debt and the compounding interest on our debt this year, we all know this is higher than our military budget, so it's hard to understand why any of our colleagues, or anyone in Congress, even our Democrat colleagues, would be against DOGE.”

“I just got off the phone with the DOGE team before I headed over for our podcast today, and I was talking with them about 400,000 Social Security numbers that they have found out were stolen,” Greene added. “And the good news is the Department of Justice will be arresting someone.”

Miller agreed with Greene’s points, noting that DOGE’s findings have put a new meaning on Tax Day this year.

“We've all hated Tax Day, but could we ever have hated it worse than this year after the onion’s being peeled back when we're finding out how abused the American taxpayer, and this is where my money's going,” she said.

The attacks on DOGE have morphed from fights in Congress to acts of physical violence against Teslas and their owners across the country — attacks that the Trump administration are looking into as potential domestic terrorism. But Greene noted that the left’s attacks have come at great cost for her personally.

“I don't like the sacrifice of having multiple people plead guilty and go to prison for planning to murder me, because that's happening. I think the Democrat Party is the party of domestic terrorism, and I think we need to start treating them that way. Look at all their movements. We can go all the way back to Occupy Wall Street, antifa, Occupy, BLM, and now we're watching it with COVID. Look at their COVID mandates and shutdown tactics. That was unbelievably unconstitutional. And now we got it with Tesla takedowns, and, apparently, GOP offices. Democrats are domestic terrorists, and they fuel it on. “

Alford noted that the outbreak of left-wing violence is “another ‘Summer of Love’ here in America.”

“Don't you love that?” Alford said, adding that “these deranged Democrats, the lunatic left, the rabid radicals can't just express themselves and make a case and try to win us over.”

“They have to perpetrate violence against us. I think we've all had [death threats]. It's crazy. That's part of the sacrifice that I think we do for this job,” he said.

While Alford, Harshbarger, Miller, and Greene had worked as a news anchor, pharmacist, farmer, and construction business owner, respectively, before being elected to Congress, they are now unified on some of the GOP’s top priorities. At the top of their list is Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R., Calif.) No Rogue Rulings Act.

“These federal judges, district court judges, think they can rule the world,” Alford said. “They can determine what the chief executive is going to do. And this has real repercussions going forward, how we move forward as a nation.”

Harshbarger, who said she is supporting Issa’s bill, noted that judges “have their districts” and said judges are “supposed to be settling feuds within their district, but they want to supersede their authority.”

“I heard Newt Gingrich speak about this to Mark Levin, as a matter of fact. And he said, that Congress has the ability to abolish the court, to defund them, or to impeach them,” Harshbarger said.

Miller added that “our Constitution has designed our system to have three branches of government as a check on power.”

“Several of these judges are out of their lane. They're trying to drag President Trump's agenda down, but the American people are wise to them and this is going to backfire on them, in my opinion,” Miller said.

Another priority for the House GOP conference is passing the bipartisan SAVE Act, which passed last year but died in the Senate.

“Why should anyone who is not a U.S. citizen be allowed to vote in a U.S. federal election?” Alford wondered. The Missouri lawmaker added that the Trump administration has “deported criminal aliens that are suspected, and they have pretty good proof for members of MS-13 or Tren de Aragua.”

The Republicans discussed the prison in El Salvador that is receiving illegal immigrants who are being deported from America under the leadership of its president, Nayib Bukele.

“They run things differently,” Alford said. “They run a tight ship there. They shave their heads, they make them dress alike. They treat criminals like criminals.”

Greene, for her part, asked “why can't our prisons just be like El Salvador's?” Alford replied that it’s “funny that you should mention that.”

“I'm on the Appropriations for Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, and we had the head administrator for the federal prison system testifying before us three weeks ago, and I said, ‘ma'am, do we have the best prison system in America in the world?’ She wouldn't answer the question. I said, ‘are we using the best practices for reform and punishment from other prisons around the world? Are we bringing those practices here?’ She says, ‘we don't look at other prisons, no.’”

The Republicans are also pushing back against the left’s gender ideology, which several have seen take over hospitals and schools in their home states. Greene discussed her Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which “will criminalize sex changes on kids.”

“It's exactly what President Trump is asking for. I'm really excited. The Judiciary Committee is going to be marking it up soon, so we'll hopefully get to have a vote on it on the House floor, and President Trump is ready to sign it into action,” Greene said.

Harshbarger, who noted that she is “still a pharmacist” and “will go back to being a pharmacist” after leaving Congress, lambasted Vanderbilt University for finding out “through a recording that they said it's a cash cow to do these puberty blockers and to do this affirming care… it's a lie from the pits of Hell that you can change your sex.”

Miller, who has a bill to codify that there are two sexes and to codify “keeping those boys and men out of our girls safe spaces,” marveled that Democrats are “picking the wrong agenda to die on.”

Miller added that she is also glad that “the Department of Education is going to be closed and we're going to return control to parents and to local school districts and allow the school districts and the parents to cooperate together and reflect the values of the community where they are.”

The GOP group added that most were in the MAHA movement before it was cool. Greene, who thinks that “ice cream should be like its own food group, because it's so great,” lavished praise on raw milk’s health benefits; Harshbarger, ever the health conscious Republican, said that she’s partial to a Edy's Slow Churned ice cream that’s half-fat.

While some of the Republicans differed on ice cream flavors, Alford reflected that within the RSC, “we are all in this together, fighting for conservative values; we’re the largest conservative caucus on the Hill, and people from many different walks of life have come together to fight for a common cause, and that is for the truths to prevail on Capitol Hill and in America”

The RSC podcast’s latest episode, a GOP source noted, is a way that the largest committee in the GOP conference is able to promote “all of its 180 members and give them the opportunity to have unfiltered conversations that bypass the mainstream media.”

All episodes of the RSC’s Right to the Point podcast can be found here.