(PresidentialWire.com)- At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz said multiple agencies in the federal government should lose their funding or altogether be abolished if they won’t “come to heel.”
During a speech he gave at the conference, which was held late last week in Maryland, Gaetz said:
“Perhaps the most important concession that we received during that fight was the establishment of a special group of legislators to analyze the weaponization of this government against our people. Seems like every time I turn around, they’re engaged in surveillance or list building or monitoring.
“I don’t care if it takes every second of our time and every ounce of our energy, we either get this government back on our side or we defund and get rid of, abolish the FBI, CDC, ATF, DOJ, every last one of them if they do not come to heel.”
What Gaetz was referring to in the “fight” was the fact that he and a small group of conservative GOP members of the House held off on supporting Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House until they got certain concessions. One of those big concessions was the panel he was referring to, which is officially known as the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Republican Representative Jim Jordan from Ohio chairs that subcommittee.
That panel held a February 9 hearing, at which Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic representative from Hawaii, said that Google’s censorship policies ultimately derailed her most recent political campaign.
Republican Senators Ron Johnson from Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley from Iowa also told the subcommittee of surveillance that the FBI conducted on the 2016 presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump, as well as information that came from whistleblowers from the agency.
Gaetz took time during his CPAC speech to also criticize those who spoke out against him and the other members of the House GOP “holdouts,” who forced 15 rounds of balloting before McCarthy ultimately won the gavel. He commented:
“If you believe the mainstream media, we wanted crazy things. We were this wild group of radicals who actually thought we should have a few days to read legislation before we vote on it. We had extreme ideas, like the bills before our consideration should comport to a single subject, so that I wouldn’t have to vote on the farm bill the same time I’m voting on war powers in Yemen.
“We thought we really could send a shock through the system with a requirement that the amendments to bills actually be germane to the subject area of the bill. We thought that bureaucrats who turned against the American People should have their salaries singled out so we could vote against them.”
During his CPAC speech, Gaetz also railed against many other traditional ways of doing things in Congress that he and his group proposed reforming that many outsiders criticized.
