LIVE: Senate GOP Leadership Holds Press Conference (July 30)

You might think so, but not, because I have ordered a report of the IRS and audit, and what we found out, the report just came back, folks, and the IRS can't pass their own audit. What we learned through that report is there are over 5,800 employees of the IRS that owe back taxes to the tune of $50 million. $50 million. 5,800 people owe that. So the IRS employees that owe this, they are the same ones that are out there promoting through the IRS that tax evasion is a serious crime. Seriously? And they have 5,800 tax evaders. So my audit of the IRS Act ensures that the Biden-Harris IRS Army is forced to live by their own rules. Why are we hiring people that won't even live by their own agency's rules? Honest taxpayers shouldn't have to pay the salaries of tax evaders. Right? Common sense, folks. Common sense. It's time to tell all of these IRS bureaucrats, you're fired. Hello, everybody. Well, this week, a bipartisan National Defense Commission issued a report on the status of our nation's preparedness to have a conflict, and it gave us a pretty stark warning. And I believe there was some testimony towards this this morning. We see what's happening in Ukraine with Russia. We see what's happening in Israel with Iran proxies. And we certainly saw what just happened with Hezbollah launching a missile into Israel that killed 12 people at a soccer game, most of them children. These are brutal, brutal terrorists. And the messages that came from this report, when we see what's going around the world, and certainly China is at the forefront here, is that we are facing very challenging threats, and we're unprepared or we're ill-prepared. We are not ready. So some of the findings is that the American public, as the public, we're largely unaware of the cybersecurity threat, which is one of the premier threats we see across the country, across the world. The U.S. homeland itself, in this report, it was said that the U.S. homeland itself could be the target for a significant public impact in the coming years. So we talked a lot about cybersecurity. I mentioned it earlier. We – I just wrote an op-ed talking about the threats of cybersecurity. We saw what happened with CrowdStrike and how that could take – and that wasn't even a cyberattack. That's just how, I think, volatile and damaging an attack through our IT and our technologies can be. So according to the report, the Biden national defense strategy simply does not prepare us to deter or to have us prevail in a conflict. That's a pretty stark warning. So what would you do if you were the leader of the United States Senate? Wouldn't you turn to the National Defense Authorization? Wouldn't you turn to the one bill that's going to set the priorities in a bipartisan way for the next several years for us to be able to turn back such an attack and for us to fortify our own defenses? And here we sit. We've got showboats going on. We've got nominations going on. And yet our National Defense Authorization is still sitting idle after it was passed out of committee. Ronald Reagan said, we know only too well that – I've got to put my glasses on, okay? We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong but when they are weak, and it is then that tyrants are tempted. We know tyrants around the world are tempted, and we know that those same tyrants are looking at us and looking for weakness. And this report from the commission is a wake-up call, I think, for all of us, and we should be voting on the floor this week for the NDAA bill. If you like San Francisco politics, you've got to love Kamala Harris. Going back to March 24, 2021, Joe Biden appointed Kamala Harris the border czar. In fact, here's the transcript of what Joe Biden said that day about his newly-minted border czar, Kamala Harris. Quote, I can think of nobody who's better qualified to do this. She is leading the effort. She knows what she is doing. Well, clearly, she did not know what she was doing. And enabled by Senate Democrats, we've seen the border go from bad to worse. It's gone from a crisis to a catastrophe, now 10 million illegal border crossings and counting. Undocumented immigrants from countries on the State Department's terror watch list. Undocumented immigrants on the FBI terror watch list continues to grow. An illegal who was released into the United States shot a San Antonio police officer with a long rifle this past weekend. We should expect nothing less because Kamala Harris has said numerous times, by the way, despite trying to scrub her record, she said an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal. If anybody doubts that, take a look at her tweet. When she was serving with us in the U.S. Senate. There's a reason why she was ranked the most liberal U.S. senator during her time in the Senate. By the way, they're trying to scrub that. That was on GovTrack. They're trying to get that removed digitally. But, you know, it gets worse. Do you remember that famous interview with NBC's Lester Holt? He pointed out to Biden's border czar, Kamala Harris, in an interview that she had not been to the border. After she claimed she had. Do you remember her response? She was a bit flustered and said, and I haven't been to Europe. So I brought along a little chart here. Washington, D.C. to London is about seven hours. To get from here to McAllen, Texas, about three hours. I understand she's headed to Houston. Might suggest a trip down to McAllen, Texas and check out the southern border. You know, there's a big difference, though, between Europe and our southern border. Because Joe Biden's border crisis is Kamala Harris's failure. And the American people are going to hold this administration and the Senate Democrats accountable this fall for their failures at the southern border. Well, I wonder if you all have noticed that Manu has a new sort of no tie fashionable look. Now, when he wasn't on television, he was not so careful. Casual Tuesday. Given your support for aid to Ukraine, does a selection of JD Vance get any pause since he's a leading opponent of aid to Ukraine? Well, look, I support the ticket. I also support Ukraine. And I'm going to be arguing no matter who gets elected president. As Shelly was just pointing out, it's not just Ukraine. We've got worldwide organized authoritarian regimes talking to each other. China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and Iran's proxies. This is a serious challenge. The current administration made two big mistakes. Number one was withdrawing from Afghanistan, where we were not losing any personnel. And number two, they haven't submitted a single budget that even keeps up with inflation. This is the single largest problem facing the democratic world, no matter who wins the election. And that's what I'm going to be working on for the next couple of years. After the NATO summit, President Trump invited Viktor Orban down to Mar-a-Lago. Is that a mistake, given that Orban has repeated Russian talking points and propaganda? Well, I can tell you how I feel about Viktor Orban. He's the one member of NATO who's essentially turned his country over to the Chinese and the Russians. He's been looking for ways to undermine NATO's efforts to defeat the Russians in Ukraine. So Viktor Orban, I think, has now made Hungary the most recent problem in NATO. We used to think of the Turks as sort of being never quite with the team. I think Orban has replaced the Turks and is clearly the weakest member of NATO. You've said that we need to move with the speed of relevance to bolster our Indo-Pacific allies' defenses. And yet, former President Trump has said Taiwan needs to pay for us to defend it, and that we're no different than an insurance company. Do you disagree with that, and do you think a Trump administration would? Yeah, who's going to be the new administration? But it's pretty clear that our allies in Asia, and now you can add the Philippines to the group, are all concerned about Chinese aggression. They are watching what happens to Russia in Ukraine carefully. You all heard the Prime Minister of Japan a few weeks ago talking about Ukraine in his address to Congress. So I think the whole democratic world is together here, the countries that actually elect their leaders. And unfortunately, the authoritarians tend to be, are all collected as well. So this is the clearest example of the democratic world needing to stand up to these authoritarians. Reagan had it right. It's one thing that works. Peace, you get through strength. To give you an idea of just how much work off, at the height of World War II, 37 percent of our gross domestic product was spent on defense, and millions of people were getting killed. It's a lot cheaper to have strength in advance than it is to showcase weakness and have to deal with the aftermath.