Rep. Mike Gallagher On Congress, China, And Public Service

>> Bill Whalen: It's Thursday, March 7th, 2024, and welcome back to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast dedicated to governance and balance of power here in America and around the world. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm the Hoover Institution's Virginia Hobbes Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism. I'm not the only Hoover fellow podcasting these days.

I recommend you go to our website, which is hoover.org. Go to the top of the homepage to where it says commentary, click on that, and head over to where it says multimedia, and up will come audio podcast. You'll find about a dozen or so, including this one. My guest today is Congressman Mike Gallagher.

Since 2017, Congressman Gallagher has repped Wisconsin's 8th congressional district, which runs alongside lightweight Michigan. Green Bay is the heart of his district in the 118th Congress, which still has a few months to go. Mike Gallagher serves as chairman of the select committee on the strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

He also chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber Information Technologies and Innovation. He is one of 13 Republicans serving as a member of the House Permanent select Committee on Intelligence. On this, the day of the president's State of the Union address, he joins us to talk about the state of Congress, the state of the world, China in particular, and at least one big change in his near future.

Congressman Gallagher, thanks for taking some time out on what I imagine is a very busy day on Capitol Hill.

>> Mike Gallagher: It's an honor to be with you.

>> Bill Whalen: So let me begin with an apology to you, sir, an apology in this regard. You were kind enough to come on the Hoover Goodfellows broadcast back in January of 2023.

For listeners not familiar, this is a YouTube broadcast that we do with Neil Ferguson, John Cochran, H.R McMaster, and it's on YouTube, you should check it out. The Congressman was kind enough to come on in January 2023rd, and as the moderator of the show, I did something I've since regretted.

I started the show with a very lame joke. A couple weeks not long before that broadcast, the Green Bay Packers, the Congressman Gallagher's beloved football team, they had suffered a really painful loss. They'd ended their season by losing it home to the Detroit Lions. It was Aaron Rodgers last game, and I started the show by making a very lame joke, which is, I guess you're coming out to San Francisco to watch the 49ers and Packers.

I remember, you having kind of a funny look on your face, which was you either didn't know whether to laugh along or just flip the bird at me at what. But this came to mind, Congressman, because the Packers did make the playoffs this year. They did come out to San Francisco, they gave the 49ers a heart attack.

And as I was watching that game, I thought, this is karma for being a jerk to Mike Gallagher.

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, there was no offense taken. I was distraught at the end of last season over the future of the franchise. And the good news is, I mean, Jordan Love is looking great.

I mean, this season went from, we had huge ups and downs, but then we started making a run. We made the playoffs by the skin of our teeth. And I went into that Cowboys game with no expectations, just kinda feeling, okay, Jordan Love is proven. He's the franchise QB, the future's bright.

Happy to be at the dance, but don't expect to win. And then we crushed the Cowboys. So then I immediately started thinking, okay, we're going to the Super bowl. This is 2010, 2011 vibes, where you had, we were the last seed. We had a bunch of away games and we made a run and won the Super Bowl.

And the first half of the 9ers game, I'm, all right, let's go. And then we bungled it, two dropped interceptions. But still, you have to be bullish about the future of the Packers, the youngest team in the league, a quarterback that looks great, led some more pieces this year.

If we can stay healthy, I think, we're gonna dominate the NFC north and just make a run. So we'll see, maybe I just jinxed it there.

>> Bill Whalen: No, I don't think so, I was gonna point out that they are the youngest team in the NFL. I'm a child of Washington DC, by the way.

I grew up in the heydays of George Allen and the Over the Hill gang, and the slogan, the future is now. This is not the Packers, you guys are on a great ascent. But this is a nice segue, I think, to talk about your decision to step down from Congress.

You've only been in Congress for four terms, correct?

>> Mike Gallagher: This is correct.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, and you turned 40 just a couple days ago, correct?

>> Mike Gallagher: This is correct.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, so when a Congressman in his fourth term who is only 40 years old steps down, everybody wants to know what's going on here.

I think you said words to the effect of, Congress is no place to grow old. I looked up the median age of the House, Congressman, it's 57.9 years. So in theory, Mike Gallagher, if the good people of the eight districts are willing, you could be hanging out in that district for years and years to go.

So why did you decide to call it a day and leave Washington?

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, when I turned 40, I realized that I would have to wait 40 more years until I could run for president under the current system and our octogenarian leaders, and the boomers' vice-like grip on the future of America.

Actually, that's unfair, Biden is not a boomer. He is so old, he's not a boomer.

>> Bill Whalen: 1942, yeah.

>> Mike Gallagher: He's a member of the silent generation, older than the People's Republic of China is our current president. On a more serious note, I guess there were a few variables that played into the decision.

The first and most important is that my wife and I, we have two daughters. They're three and one, we would very much like to have more kids. And, this lifestyle is pretty brutal for a young family. If we were in a different, I think, stage of our life, it would be easier.

And that's my top priority, is building a family. The second is, to the point you made, 20 years, 30 years in Congress, I think it's not what the framers had in mind. You had in mind the model of the citizen legislator. You served for a short period of time, then you'd go back home.

I always had in mind, even when I ran for the first time at the age of 32 and was the youngest man in Congress, kind of 8 to 12 years. My term limit, Bill, is 12 years, I think that's enough. That's enough where you can have an impact, but not overstay your welcome.

And I think the institution would be healthier if people didn't stay here for too long. Maybe on a more selfish and practical level, I'd always envision the type of career where I would do private sector and then stints of service in the national security community. And I am, at core, kind of a national security nerd in a meaningful way.

The political path has been a detour from the career I had envisioned, which is private sector, maybe going to an administration for a little bit, go back, and I kinda wanna get back to that. And I think being only 40 gives me enough room to do something real in private industry, as opposed to just like, government relations or something like that.

No offense to people that do that. And so I don't know, complex combination of those things. It just felt like the right time for me to step back. Maybe I'd add one more, which is that I kind of had the best job in Congress the last two years of chairing the select committee on China.

Been incredibly rewarding, incredibly bipartisan. And so it would be hard, and maybe this just sounds a little arrogant. I mean, just being honest with you, it'd be hard to go back to just being a rank and file member. If the committee doesn't exist in the next Congress or if we don't have control of the House majority, that'd be tough cuz I've just been going all out in a full sprint, and it's been such a rewarding experience.

 

>> Bill Whalen: I did some math, Congressman, as of March, the first 42 House members are not seeking reelection. This is not unusual, if you go back to 2020, 40 members did not choose to run again. And it's not close to the jailbreak in 2018 when 55 members decided to step down.

But of the 42, this includes four committee chairs, including yourself. Is this a reflection of term limits for committees, or is there something larger at work here and that committee chairmen tend to be very serious people, and this is a house where it's very difficult to be a serious person?

 

>> Mike Gallagher: Yeah, I think I have to concede part of that point. Listen, I don't know, I haven't talked to Catherine Morris Rogers or Patrick McHenry or whoever else has decided not to run, so I don't presume to speak for them. And like any big decision, it's overdetermined, right?

There's probably a lot of different variables playing into it, but I do think it's Congress. A few things are happening that's making it much more difficult to be a productive member. One is, and this predates the modern Congress, this goes back to the seventies, we keep giving away authority to the executive branch and the institution gets less powerful.

And then within the institution, and this is secondly, the power keeps getting concentrated within leadership and the speaker's office and the steering committee. And so your rank and file members, or even your committee chairs, I think, get increasingly disillusioned because we govern outside of regular order from crisis to crisis, and then we're forced to swallow a big omnibus bill at the end of the year.

And furthermore, we have this divide between appropriations, and authors, and committees that no longer makes any sense. And then maybe the final thing is just with the rise of social media, it seems like the incentives are pushing people to be like C list celebrities as opposed to constructive members of the committee, right?

The rational choice now, if your goal is to accrue power, is to pursue it on TV and on social media as opposed to within the confines of a committee. And thus, we have rendered the modern Congress into something resembling a green room for Fox News and MSNBC rather than a serious legislative body.

And that's frustrating, maybe, I guess, you could sprinkle in related to the first thing I said, which is the increasing power of the executive. The presidency has become so powerful that our four year presidential contest become this all consuming black hole that sucks everything into its wake. And it's, you spend all your time answering questions about what did Trump say?

What did Biden say and it's just sometimes that can be frustrating, if any of that makes sense.

>> Bill Whalen: It makes a lot of sense, here's a good example. I think what is a symptom of what ails us, it's the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas. I have a bias here, I don't know, Mr. Mayorkas, but I'm generally, I take issue with the impeachment process in this regard.

I didn't think it was a good idea to go down that road with Bill Clinton. I thought Censor was a cleaner option for him inside the House. I didn't care for the first Trump impeachment. The second one, well, I think there was a conversation to be had there.

But I don't understand why the house went down this road with my arches, knowing that at the end of the day, it wasn't going to really go anywhere. And you were actually one of four Republicans who voted against the impeachment. Can you just explain why you voted against the impeachment?

And really, if this is as symbolic as I think it is.

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, first, let me say, I understand the frustration, right? Nobody can look at the southern border and come away anything other than completely outraged and shocked at the human tragedy on the border. The chaos it's causing throughout the country, the death caused by the flow of fentanyl across the southern border.

And I think the Biden administration deserves a blame for the severity of the crisis. I mean, they basically moved immediately to a policy of open borders, and now it's created total chaos on the border itself and through the United States. So I understand the emotion behind the effort and I share it.

However, it doesn't, in my mind, then logically follow that Mayorkas is impeachable for a few reasons. One is that, the framers pretty explicitly rejected the idea that one could be impeached for maladministration. And even if the non-enforcement of the law is so egregious as to have gone beyond that standard of maladministration, we are creating a new lower bar for impeachment here.

Which leads to the second thing. Part of my argument against both Trump impeachments were that by pursuing the first impeachment in the absence of a crime, the Democrats were lowering the bar for impeachment and thus opening the Pandora's box of perpetual impeachment. And a future Congress is likely to exploit that lower bar.

And that seems to be exactly what's happened here. And I worry about it rendering future administrations unworkable and ungoverning, because if the Congress is controlled by the opposite party, they'll just start impeaching cabinet officials. Which leads to the final thing and may actually be the strongest argument against it in my mind.

Even if I can see that there's like an impeachable offense here, and I don't actually concede that, but let's say I did. Would not Biden be the logical target of impeachment? Because as incompetent as Mayorkas is, he's implementing the policies that the president has asked him to implement.

It's not as if he's gone rogue and done something that Biden doesn't approve of. That Biden's like a border hawk, and Mayorkas is an open border guy, no, no. The buck stops with the president, and impeaching a cabinet secretary for implementing the policies of the president has never made sense to me.

It's why we've never done it before. I mean, we've done it with a guy who committed a crime in the 1800s, but that was a different case. But for those reasons, I voted against it. I guess what was most unnerving to me in the experience was I truly respect a lot of the people on the other side.

I think Chairman Greene in particular is a very thoughtful, smart guy. But also, I didn't really think it was a close call on the merits. And it's not like the null hypothesis in my mind is that I'm always wrong. Maybe that's cuz I just walk around with Catholic guilt.

So I don't know, I couldn't see the other side of the argument, and that was really unnerving to me in the process.

>> Bill Whalen: So is there a future on the hill if you buck the caucus? I'm looking at Kirsten Sinema, who announced yesterday that she is not gonna seek reelection, she's gonna drop out.

And she went sideways with her caucus and said that when she said that she was not gonna go along with changing the filibuster. And that immediately kind of made her a dead person walking as far as her future in democratic circles.

>> Mike Gallagher: I think, well, I can't speak for Arizona, although I did.

So Kirsten and I run the annual congressional race every year, and she is the fastest woman in Congress and I'm the fastest man. So I reached out to her after her announcement. I said, the fastest members of Congress are gonna be really slow next year. But I think there is, it's not comfortable in the moment, but at least in my own experience, and maybe this is just a Wisconsin thing or a northeast Wisconsin thing.

I actually think people respect you if they have a sense that you're independently minded. And even if they disagree with you, if you're willing just to kind of explain, okay, here's why I voted the way I did, I think people respect that. So in my own experience, that was certainly the case.

I voted against Trump's declaration of an emergency on the southern border because he was taking money Congress had appropriated for the military and unilaterally re-appropriating it a different purpose, which I thought was unconstitutional. I did not object to the 2020 election and was very critical of the precedent and his claims surrounding the election.

And certainly, that angered a lot of people in my party, in the grassroots back home. But after each of those experiences, I won re-election with a wider margin. I think in part because people knew that I would listen to people's views, but ultimately, I wasn't beholden to any party leader or any president.

I was gonna do my own thing. And so if you're willing to kinda go through the gauntlet, I think you can arrive at a point where you're stronger politically, but you gotta be willing to do that work, and you gotta wanna run. And there's no easy way to win an election.

You either run scared or unopposed, those are the only two ways to run.

>> Bill Whalen: I wanna get to China in a minute, Congresswoman, cuz there's been a lot of news on that front, including a bill that you introduced this week. But let's detour through Ukraine for a couple of minutes.

I don't know if you saw the news reports about the lead up to the president's State of the Union, but apparently the Biden White House invited Alexei widow to sit in the gallery, she said no, she said she's exhausted. I can only begin to imagine what that woman has been through, but they also invited Olena Zelenska, who was the first lady of Ukraine, and she said no as well.

And I imagine that she talked to her husband about it, and they thought this is maybe not a good thing to do when you're in the process of trying to get aid out of Congress. Let's talk about the aid in this regard. I'm just kinda confused as to where the Republican position on Ukraine is right now to go back to our conversation about the Packers, it seems the goalposts just continue to move.

There are members who do nothing want Ukraine aid at all. There are members who are willing to give some aid. There are members who want to give a lot of aid. There are members who only will do it on the condition of immigration and border security. And then when they don't like the border security, the whole thing goes down.

So what do your people want here?

>> Mike Gallagher: I don't think the party has a unified position. If I had to guess, they'll unify around or not unify 100%. But the dominant position will be whatever position our nominee, which is likely to be Trump, articulates, which will be much more skeptical of continued funding to Ukraine.

Now, I disagree with that, I think it's in our interest to continue to provide clinical, lethal assistance to Ukraine. And I think it also presents some other opportunities to enhance deterrence in other parts of the world, particularly the Indo Pacific, the greater threat we face from China. As well as rebuild our entire munitions industrial base in the process.

But the party is divided on this issue, and if I could try and explain what I think is the source of republican skepticism, or let's say half the party's skepticism on it. I think it's a combination of why do you think President Biden has not done a good job of sort of articulating a vision for victory or an end state that people can comprehend and get behind.

I also think it was a mistake for him to make his post October 7th speech primarily about Ukraine and not Israel, and kind of politicized that moment, and that Oval Office address in a way that was actually counterproductive to the effort in Ukraine. I wonder if there isn't another thing going on, which is that, which might explain kind of the hostility from a lot of conservative commentators on TV and social media.

Which is because of the Trump impeachments and sort of the link to Ukraine. There's this sense that the entire country is corrupt or that the Democrats are trying to do something with it. It's all gotten muddled with that issue in a weird way. And I do think and I'm actually sympathetic to this last point that I'm about to make which is whenever you see sort of progressives taking an issue and turning it into, a religious issue, right?

You saw this in the pandemic, right? Where you saw with Mueller first and foremost, where people literally were buying votive candles of Robert Mueller. You then saw it and that all turned out to be a total farce. You saw it in the pandemic where the new saints became Fauci and not Mueller.

And now it's, people take their black lives matter, sign on their lawn, they turn it around, they turn it into Ukraine flag. There's a weird phenomenon where if the secular left turns a thing into an object of religious devotion, I think the right is very skeptical of that thing.

I've seen that phenomenon play out, does that make sense at all?

>> Bill Whalen: That makes a lot of sense, it's values on display. If you came out here to Northern California, you and I went for a walk around the neighborhood here. You would find Ukraine signs occasionally in laws, but in windows, wrong decals.

And you're right, before that, it was BLM. And just, it's always, it's just kind of value signaling by the left, they just love to do that.

>> Mike Gallagher: Which is like a better argument for Ukraine would be one that's far more hard nosed like a classical realist argument for why it's in our interest to support them and sort of reduce the combat capability of the Russians.

And by the way, turn this into the triple bank shot for building a bunch of weapons systems that are not only relevant in eastern Europe, but also relevant in the Middle east and relevant in the Pacific. And by the way, use this as a wake up call the NATO to get them to invest in their own defense, surge forces out of garrison in Germany to frontline states, build that expeditionary base in Poland.

Take advantage of the frontline NATO allies who really are hardcore and wanna do the right thing and use that as leverage against some of the Western European NATO states who aren't moving as expeditiously and also, by the way, are more compromised on China. I think a very effective president could do that and play that three-dimensional geopolitical and also put forward a message that would be more receptive to members of Congress.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, let's play a little what if here and the what if is this. The Republican response for the State of the Union tonight is being delivered by Katie Britt. She's a junior senator from Alabama. She was born in 1982, which makes her, I think, two years older than you, I believe.

Also means that when she was coming into the world, Joe Biden was finishing his 10th year in the Senate. Getting back to our talk about gerontocracy in Washington, this just staggering what's going on in this, this country in terms of gerontocracy. But what if Congressman an alternate universe, she's not giving the State of the Union response, and Donald Trump is?

And I've actually been floating this with my colleagues out here. I hope your head doesn't explode now, but it makes sense in this regard. He is now the Republican nominee I'm waiting. And if there's a good Trump and a bad Trump, we know what the bad Trump is.

But the good Trump is the guy who's in front of a teleprompter and he's reading a script and he has to be disciplined. And that would actually not be a bad 15 minutes use of his time. Here's my question, Congressman. What if Donald Trump did that response and he said in that response that he agrees with President Biden on Ukraine.

We must give them aid and we must give them aid right now. What would your pals Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc, what would they do? Would they go along with this or is their attitude just they want everybody to pounce in? What would they react with Donald Trump said you've got to move on Ukraine?

 

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, first of all, on this idea, I actually quite liked it. It's not like saying it has to be a member of Congress, right? I mean, there's no statute.

>> Bill Whalen: And it would get clicks, it would overshadow speech. But the question is-

>> Mike Gallagher: Yeah, just as a speaker doesn't have to be a member of the House, too.

That's always been a quirk of history we've never experimented with.

>> Bill Whalen: But your colleagues-.

>> Mike Gallagher: To answer your question, yeah, I honestly, I don't know the answer to that. I do sort of, I think take the point underlying the question which is there does seem to be like the new definition of a true conservative is whatever Trump is for.

And like the new definition of a RINO is if you don't support Trump which is of course, absurd. And like conservatives are now seem to be actively against things that we were for before, particularly entitlement reform, right? And you just can't have a responsible approach to the debt without talking about entitlement reform.

And now it's, our message is Democrat progressive message on social security and healthcare and things like that. So that is a real thing, I don't know if we've ever tested the limits of Trump's power in quite that way. That would be an interesting test to pick. Yeah, I don't know the answer to the question.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let's shift to China now. So on Tuesday, you introduced a bipartisan bill. Let's underscore that word, bipartisan, this is not Mike Gallagher and Republicans, this is democrats who bind us as well. What your bill do, Congressman, would give ByteDance 165 days to divest from TikTok or else the app would no longer be available and app stores are accessible on us based web hosting services.

Tell me what's going on here.

>> Mike Gallagher: The fundamental problem we're trying to address is the ownership structure of TikTok. The TikTok is owned by ByteDance and ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. In compliance with Chinese law TikTok or ByteDance Is legally required to support the work of the CCP.

And under their ownership structure, the Chinese government has the ability to manipulate their algorithms, surveillance users, conduct influence operations that quietly populate Americans For You Pages. So this is a problem because TikTok is no longer just an app for funny dance videos. It's a predominant news source for Americans under the age of 30.

And allowing a CCP-controlled entity like TikTok to become the dominant media player in America, I think, would be as if at the height of the Cold War, right before the Cuban missile crisis in 62. We'd allowed Pravda and the KGB to purchase the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, and NBC.

Notably, our bill would allow for TikTok to survive. All they have to do is divest from CCP-controlled ByteDance. The app can then remain in the United States, investors in TikTok can make money, they can go public in New York. All the things that we like to celebrate with American capitalism.

The bill is about preventing foreign adversaries, as defined in terms of four countries, China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, from controlling social media apps here in the United States. And there's precedent for this approach. We've tried to take a very narrow, focused approach. We've tried to avoid any constitutional issues like a bill of attainder.

But every single national security official in the current administration, from the director of National Intelligence to the CIA director to most recently the FBI director in front of my committee, has said that under the current ownership structure, TikTok is a threat to American national security. And so we're trying to solve that before it's too late.

 

>> Bill Whalen: All right, you have hundreds, if not thousands, of candidates across the country using TikTok in this cycle, most notably the president of the United States. Should they be off TikTok?

>> Mike Gallagher: They should, and I've heard some arguments that, well, we can't do this because we're gonna anger younger voters.

I don't find that persuasive or persuasive enough to overrule national security concerns. And by the way, as I alluded to before, this is about ensuring divestment, not censorship. So if any entity other than the CCP owns TikTok, Americans can still do dance videos, politicians can use TikTok to campaign.

They'll have the same freedom of expression. And what they'll also have now is freedom of thought, rather than the manipulation of content via an opaque algorithm that's controlled by the CCP. So you get the same freedom of speech, restored freedom of thought. And also sometimes in anti-trust cases, they require a company to have ownership structures changed.

And indeed, people are talking about that right now for social media companies, American social media companies. And no one has ever claimed that in those conversations, altering an ownership structure of the platform equals stifling the free speech of its users, and that's the absurdity here. Equating company ownership structure of what happens to the platforms that facilitate speech with crackdown on the speech itself.

The ownership is Chinese, the speech is American and everybody else's, this is about the former, not the latter. And by the illogic of TikTok's argument, the breakup of bell in was that 82, when Katie Britt was born? Two years before I entered this world, would have been one of the most monumental First Amendment events in American history.

So again, we tried to be constructive and responsible cuz this is a complex issue, we wanna be wary of the precedent we're setting. It's found up in this bigger issue of cross border data flows. We explicitly make sure that none of the authority in the bill could be used to target American companies.

It's all about foreign adversary control.

>> Bill Whalen: How aggressive are companies like TikTok and other companies with ties to CCP on Capitol Hill? Do they lobby fiercely? Do they pump a lot of money into campaigns? What is their approach?

>> Mike Gallagher: Hugely aggressive, I mean, TikTok has spent millions and millions of dollars lobbying against any legislative action.

If you've watched any of the Republican debates, there's been multiple TikTok ads in each of the debates. Turn on the TV, you'll see an ad saying, TikTok is the guardian of small business in America. There's also something more pernicious going on. Right now, in fact, on the Hill, phones are ringing off the hook.

Because if you open up TikTok, if you open up the app, you get a pop-up, and it says, enter your zip code. And then it will automatically call the member of Congress from that zip code. And so TikTok is using the app to influence members and scare members into taking action on the bill, which is really aggressive.

And you also have Americans that own a big stake in ByteDance, that are using their funding of conservative grassroots organizations to scare members into doing anything. So it's a pretty insidious campaign. I think it gets pretty close to what's called a Foreign Agents Registration Act violation. You have people that are effectively unregistered lobbyists for TikTok, which is a Chinese company.

They're exploiting loopholes in our FARA laws, as well as the Lobbying Disclosure act. Even for the DC swamp, this is about as swampy as it gets.

>> Bill Whalen: Let's now turn our attention, Congressman, to a little speck of land in the South China Sea, the Second Thomas Shoal, and the news there this week.

This is the outpost with the Philippines. They have a little installation there, and the Chinese coast guard is making life awful. They try to resupply the shoal. Chinese coast guard boats come out, and they spray it with water, try to push them away. Is this the kind of situation that will manifest into something large?

And what I'm getting at is, as we talk about the situation with China, the southeast, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and so forth, it's always a question of what steps next and what could start things to tumble out of control. And choose your scenario, it's small islands in the South China Sea.

It's an actual invitation to Taiwan, but I'm sure you're studying what's going on the Second Thomas Shoal, how important is this?

>> Mike Gallagher: It's critical because the Philippines are a treaty ally of the United States, and there was some ambiguity or discussion in previous years about whether an incident on the Second Thomas Shoal would trigger our treaty commitments.

I was glad to see, at least as I interpret it, the administration resolved that ambiguity. I think this message we're sending is that it would, but all it would take is, say, an incident that devolves into shooting between Philippine forces and PLA forces for us to potentially be drawn in to Philippine's defense.

And, I mean, it's a fascinating situation where you just have this old ship that has been deliberately marooned on the shoal. And you have all these Philippine forces that have to resupply it, and they're getting harassed by the Chinese with water guns and things like that. Because this is part of the broader project that goes back to 2009, where China is making all these extremely aggressive and expansive territorial claims throughout the East China Sea and the South China Sea and the first and second island chain.

And where land doesn't exist, they're building it, right? They're sort of building islands and then planting dangerous facts on those man-made reefs and structures. So this could be a flash point that devolves into a bigger confrontation. I think we spend most of our time on Capitol Hill thinking through the Taiwan scenario.

What happens if China takes an outlying island or launches an invasion of Taiwan itself, or implements a blockade? I do think that's sort of the most pressing case we need to plan around. But this could absolutely be an alternative thing that draws us into a crisis with China.

I think the broader point here, actually to connect the two, part of the reason I think the defense of Taiwan is so important, its not only because Taiwan is a semiconductor superpower and the PLA taking Taiwan would completely disrupt the global economy. And then authority to preserve that semiconductor manufacturing capability would allow them to hold the rest of the world economically hostage.

I also think it would make our ability to fulfill our extant treaty commitments in the region, most notably with Japan and the Philippines, completely impossible. And so by taking Taiwan, they could completely sever the entire alliance structure in the region that has been a force for good. The final point I would make here that pertains to the Philippines, it pertains to Taiwan, it pertains to really anything in the region.

And in the first island chain in particular is, our strategy is a defensive one. We are not seeking to upend the status quo. We are merely seeking to hold the line. And increasingly, China is testing that line and engaging in what the political scientists would call salami-slicing tactics to see what they can get away with.

And all it would take is one inciting incident for this to quickly escalate into a confrontation that has the potential to make the current war in Ukraine and in Israel Gaza look like child's play in comparison. And that's a situation we are not currently prepared for, both in terms of our military capability, but also just in terms of our citizenry and what that would mean, right?

I mean, if one aircraft carrier gets sunk in an exchange with China, that's 5,000 lives lost. I mean, that's almost what we lost in 20 years of the global war on terrorism. And that's a scale of warfare, you have to go back to the 1940s to really wrap your head around.

And that could be where we're headed if we don't robustly restore our military deterrent.

>> Bill Whalen: And that leads us to the third China topic I want to discuss with you, Congressman Gallagher. And that's reports this week that China plans to boost its defense spending by 7.2% this year.

Xi Jinping has been in office longer than you have, my young friend. I think he's been in for 11 years now. China's military budget has more than doubled under his time. Question for you, sir. Do you know how much the Biden administration wants to increase the US defense budget for FY25?

 

>> Mike Gallagher: 1%.

>> Bill Whalen: 1%, very good, you're a smart man. I don't wanna make this a numbers game, we obviously, can't increase our budget by 7.2%. But how do we respond when they're doing this, when they're doing 7% a year, or maybe it goes down to four or five in the future, they've doubled over 11 years.

How do we maintain a competitive position with them when they're doing that?

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, I think the numbers actually understate the amount of money that China is spending on its own defense for a couple of reasons. One, it's hard to get accurate numbers out of China, cuz people always make this point that, United States is spending more than the next ten countries combined, that's actually not true.

And also if you factor in purchasing power parity, you just factor in the cost of labor in China, these numbers start to even out and they start to approach the overall number we're spending, they're not quite there. Its a much more equitable spend between the two countries. The other point to make is, I think its still true they spend more on internal security, on their police forces and other instruments to suppress their own population than they're spending on their defense, which tells you what their true weakness is, right?

Their concern ultimately is maintaining control of the people and thereby maintaining control of the party and its stranglehold on the people. And they're willing to do whatever is necessary towards that end. And they're perfecting a techno-totalitarians surveillance state. I'm reminded of an observation that president Reagan made about the Soviet Union that applies equally to China and really all communist states still in existence.

He said something to the effect of, might have been in front of the Brandenburg gate, that of all the millions of refugees in the modern world, their flight is away from, not toward the communist world. And that on the NATO line, our guns faced east to prevent a possible invasion, but the soviet guns also faced east to prevent their people from leaving.

And the same version of that plays out today in China. So when it comes to our own defense, here's the fundamental problem as I see it. One, we haven't had that kind of Reagan esque leadership that would empower a competent secretary of defense and a very competent set of service secretaries to really go to war with their own bureaucracy.

To start to build the platforms and asymmetric systems we need to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And then secondly, the military is a microcosm of the rest of society, which is to say, money is increasingly being consumed by retirement costs and healthcare costs. Therefore, there's less money available for weapons and war-fighters and realistic training.

If we continue to go down this road, a road where this year we're spending more money to service the interest on our debt than we are spending on national defense. The military is gonna become a retirement and healthcare organization with some guns thrown into the mix. And that's kinda the really hard problem to solve.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Have you talked to Neil Ferguson about this lately? I think he has what he calls the Ferguson rule, which is when a great power spends more money on its debt than it does its military power, it's screwed.

>> Mike Gallagher: I like that Neil has a knack for coining phrases and I hope he gets get some trademark and I've often wondered, I actually tried to write an opinion about this once.

As to who coined the phrase new cold War or Cold War 2.0 is what Neil now calls it, I think. Because both him and Walter Russell Mead could argue with each other for who was using it first. But I'm a great admirer of Neil's intellect and his rhetorical skills.

And certainly, that accent puts him at an unfair advantage whenever he's arguing with me about the role detente should play in our grand strategy with China. Even though I am right and he is wrong, he comes off just sounding much more sophisticated and smart than I do.

>> Bill Whalen: I know it's cruel, the accent gives you a 30 point advantage in IQ.

But let's go back to defense for a second, Congressman. So I think there are three issues here from my layman's standpoint. One is, how much money we're willing to invest? Secondly, is efficiency, back in World War II, you could throw a lot of money into it, but you could also build a carrier in a year or two.

Now if you look at the ford class of carriers, my God, from Kiel, to actually opt to sea it takes a decade or so. And then thirdly, it's smart, so you go back to the Reagan build up in the 1980s and the 600 ship Navy, but that included battleships.

And I'm not sure if it was wise thing to be trotting battleships out of retirement. So I'm I right those are three components we need to be thinking about in terms of a buildup?

>> Mike Gallagher: I think you're right, I sort of argue, this is the framework I have in my head and what I put on paper.

The next section of defense we need to do, empowered by the president, are in the next three years build what I call an anti-navy. And that is basically, a version of what China has done to us with their rocket force. Take advantage of the fact that we're no longer bound by the constraints of the INF treaty and put in place a bunch of relatively low cost, long range precision fires on Taiwan itself in southern Japan, northern Philippines.

And then you start expanding the concentric circles throughout the Pacific, and you can really create a total hellscape for PLA planners. And that's not a lot of money. Maximize the production of long-range precision fires, long-range anti-ship missiles, SM-6, etc. That's something that could be done, and it wouldn't cost that much money anywhere between 10 to 20 billion a year, provided it was multi-year appropriation with certainty.

You could definitely do that. You need to get creative with some basing agreements. The second thing is to actually, if you look at a map of the Pacific, one thing becomes very obvious. There's a lot of water in this part of the world. So you need a bigger navy, you need a bigger navy and Air Force, given the distances and just the overall terrain.

It's not clear to me, you need a bigger army, you need a lethal army. Army plays a critical role in the Pacific, but that naval buildup is gonna require consistent demand signal and a coherent plan from the Pentagon, and we just haven't. We have all these different shipbuilding plans with contradictory timelines and we've got problems with our ability to build them quickly, workforce constraints.

We can get creative with our allies in terms of sharing our workforce and breaking down barriers to collaboration, but the third thing is really interesting and it may be the hardest thing. We are now in the midst of the historic recruiting crisis. With the exception of the Marine Corps, I think all the services are failing to meet their recruiting needs.

Now people are arguing over what's the cause of this and it too is overdetermined, right? The underlying population in America is less healthy. Increasing rates of obesity, mental health, that make it hard to serve. The genesis system that the military uses for health screening is an unmitigated disaster.

I mean, it has made the problem worse, not made it better which just tells you a lot about how the Pentagon misuses technology. I tend to believe that the politicization of the military is at the heart of it. And if you look at the numbers, the polls that come out that dig into propensity to serve, Pew has some polling.

There's something called the Jammer survey, an annual survey of active duty. It really bears this out, and in particular, among white liberals, the propensity to serve is way down. And we have this fiction out there, propagated even by military leadership, that the military is somehow a bastion of extremists, domestic extremists.

This was the first thing Lloyd Austin did when he became secretary of defense is he launched a stand down to study extremism in the ranks. And by the way, three years later, we got the study on it and guess what? There's no unusual amount of extremism in the military, right?

So I think the politicization of the military, the incidences of woke programs and DEI programs have really hurt recruiting and solving that recruiting crisis is gonna be the priority of not only the next secretary of defense, but I would argue the next president. I mean, we need an all out effort to convince the best and brightest Americans to serve their country at a time where threats to our security are growing more severe.

 

>> Bill Whalen: I neglected to mention in my intro that you served. Why don't you explain to our listeners, why you chose to go to the service? Cuz I think this is important, you can target 18-year old men and women who maybe don't have options, but you had options other than the military, so why did you decide to serve?

 

>> Mike Gallagher: I don't come from a military family. I didn't know anything about the military growing up. I mean, my stepdad served in Vietnam in the navy, and he talked about it occasionally, but it wasn't, a big part of our, lives or my relationship with him. And when I was a senior, when 911 happened in high school, and I didn't rush out to the recruiting office to enlist, in part because it's still even.

I mean, it sounds almost bad to say, but it still felt like a more distant problem or, someone else is gonna address this problem. It wasn't until I went to college and I'd always been interested in foreign languages and foreign policy and I started to. I went to Princeton undergrad, Georgetown grad school.

We then invaded when I was a sophomore, we invaded Iraq and I became interested in why we did that. I became fascinated with the Middle East. I changed my major, I started learning Arabic narration studies, became my minor. And from that I started to think about, okay, what would I actually do with these skills?

For whatever reason, I never had an interest in doing what all my peers from Princeton were doing, which is go to Wall Street and make a ton of money. That being said, now that I'm married with kids, it would have been nice to make money, I've sort of forgot to do that along the way.

But I always just kinda had this desire to go abroad and do something and kind of have some adventures. I'm always reminded of there's a great Melville quote where he says, as for me, I have an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden things and land on barbarous coasts.

I always think about that when I think about, my decision to join the Marine Corps. And so long story short, I started studying the different branches. And the Marine Corps is, the best propaganda organization in human history, the uniforms are cool. If you're, a 20-year old who wants to look cool and impress women like the Marine Corps, jumps out at you.

I also felt like it was the biggest test, but I think it was a combination of an intellectual interest in the Middle East, a desire to test myself mentally, physically in terms of my leadership skills. And the desire to serve my country, and kinda pay back a debt I felt I owed to my family, and my community that all conspired to push me into military service.

And it was definitely one of the best decisions I've ever made in my entire life. I love the Marine Corps, I got so much more out of it than they got out of me. I mean, it was awesome, I loved it, absolutely every second of it. Well, in retrospect, in the time Marines, we like being miserable and what the Marine Corps does is teach you to endure pain.

So in the moment, sometimes it doesn't feel pleasant, but you look back on it and you think, that was great.

>> Bill Whalen: Better movie Jarhead or Full Metal Jacket?

>> Mike Gallagher: Full Metal Jacket, for sure, I don't think the Marine Corps has ever had a truly great movie or miniseries in the way that the army has band of brothers.

The Air Force, I guess now has masters of the air, what is the paradigmatic?

>> Bill Whalen: No, there's the Pacific to the core.

>> Mike Gallagher: I don't think it was as good. In part just because of the nature of the conflict in the Pacific and how chewed up a lot of these units got, it was harder just to follow one unit through a coherent narrative, but I didn't think the Pacific was as good.

What would you have to say is the best Marine Corps movie of all time? I don't know, Heartbreak Ridge. I mean, there's just no one that stands out. There's not like a saving Private Ryan equivalent, so someone's got to make that. There's plenty of stories and this may be what I do in my post congressional life is to write the screenplay for a mini series about the Korean war and the battle of frozen chosen.

I mean, the Korean war is endlessly fascinating. I taught a course on the Korean war last summer and it was the 70th anniversary of the armistice agreement. This is America's forgotten war, despite the fact that tens of thousands of Americans lost their lives. There's so much human drama in the Korean War.

It was the last time we fought the communists on the battlefield, by the way. The Chinese communists, that is and the story of the marines that frozen chosen in particular is incredibly fascinating. I would commend to your millions of listeners a book by TR Fehrenbach called This Kind of War, which is immensely readable.

It's super fun and someone could make a great mini series about the Korean war, maybe that's what I should do.

>> Bill Whalen: And there's a Hollywood tie within the Gallagher family, is there nothing?

>> Mike Gallagher: Yeah, my wife was in the Irishman briefly. She's a Broadway actress, a musical theater actress.

She had a very good career for 13 years and was in a lot of cool productions like Chicago and White Christmas and Young Frankenstein. So she's incredibly talented. And our house is now just, a constant stream of dancing and singing with my two little girls. But it's actually, it's fascinating, it's increasingly hard, as I understand it, just kind of getting to know some of her friends who are still in the industry.

It's increasingly hard to make the transition from Broadway to TV or there's been some people who had very successful careers leading to Tonys and then COVID intervened, and disrupted everything. But yeah, she's the talented one in the family. Though I will say we bonded on our first date over the fact that she did Oklahoma many times in various incarnations of the show.

And I was Will Parker in my high school production of Oklahoma, but this was the senior musical. So the non-musical people got to participate. The non-talented people like me got to participate, but we bonded over our shared love of Oklahoma.

>> Bill Whalen: We're getting short on time, so let me shoehorn two things here, Congressman.

We've talked about China in terms of budgets. We've talked about China in terms of the map, and we've talked about China in terms of TikTok. So let's tie this now into your select committee. Let's talk about the committee's division of labor and then also what you think the legacy of that committee is.

 

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, first of all, the mission as I've conceived it from the start, is really to do two things, communicate to our colleagues and the American people why any of this matters. Build support for the hard things we have to do to deter China and beat the CCP over the long term.

And then second, to be sort of the policy roadmap for this Congress and future Congresses. And so our policy reports have all been turned in. And so for the committees of jurisdiction we've articulated, here's the bipartisan center of gravity for what Congress can do, regardless of who controls the White House, to put us in a better position to beat China over the long term.

I'm very proud of that, so I think the policy strategy will be part of our legacy. But I wonder if the thing we've done most effectively is just on the communication side, just to raise awareness of the threat. And honestly, what's been most surprising and gratifying to me is just by doing that, through some of the investigations we've launched, we've actually been able to change behavior on Wall Street, in corporate America, in higher education.

So there's a lot of things you can do short of passing a bill that becomes a law that actually have an impact. I would like to maybe say a final thing at the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing, I'd like to think that part of our legacy also will be just the way in which we conducted our business.

It was very constructive, there was no grandstanding.

>> Mike Gallagher: Exactly, right, despite the fact that I've been accused of being a McCarthyite and Joseph McCarthy is buried in my district and I am the second Marine intelligence officer ever elected to Congress from Wisconsin, the first being Tailgunner Joe. I was sort of painfully aware of that legacy and did everything possible to avoid going overboard.

And I have to salute the work of my ranking member, Raja Krishnamoorthi, who's been a great partner. Obviously, we don't agree on everything. There's been a lot of friction between the staffs at the time. But he's just been awesome to work with, he gets the threat. And I don't know, I'd like to think we've kinda shown that even in a divided Congress where people increasingly don't work together, you can do constructive work.

And so we'll see, I don't think there'll be history books written about the committee, but I like to think we had an impact while we were in charge of it.

>> Bill Whalen: So just a couple of minutes left, Congressman, cuz I know you have to run. You recently talked to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and here's what you said, quote, my mission is to prevent World War III.

I've dedicated myself to restoring conventional deterrence in order to prevent a war in China. And so whatever I do next will be an extension of that mission. I think that's a great quote, and here's what I'd like to ask you. I dabble in the world of politics at the Hoover Institution, especially California politics, Congressmen.

And every year, without fail, I get a visitor, and that visitor is a man or a woman in their late forties. And these people, I imagine, and they have killed it in California. They have made hundreds of millions of dollars. They're sharks, though, they're restless, and they've now conquered the world of business.

And somebody's come to them and said, well, whatever you should do, Mike Gallagher, don't run for office, you'll make an ass of yourself. At which point, Bing, the competition light bulb kicks in, and they now wanna run for office. But here's the problem, they wanna be a governor.

They don't wanna be a senator, they don't wanna start low on the ladder or work their way up, it's a vanity exercise. So here's my question, and it's simply this. It's your advice for anyone listening to this podcast who wants to be a Mike Gallagher or a Tom Cotton, somebody who wants to study, be learning about a topic, and then come to Washington and dabble in serious issues.

What's your advice for somebody who wants to go down that path?

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, when it comes to public service, I would say there's no job that's too small. I mean, if you think that you can only be a governor or a senator, and I've seen people wrestle with this, where they think even running for Congress is somehow beneath them.

I think that's a real missed opportunity, cuz I think what I've gained, a respect for my eight years doing this, is that even if it doesn't get the headlines. You can if you're very focused, if you're serious, if you work hard, you can have an impact and do some good.

And I do feel like a lot of my colleagues fall into the trap of not only staying too long, but thinking that unless they're president of the United States, their lives won't matter. And so they spend their entire career climbing the greasy pole trying to get into the White House, and they miss an opportunity to make the most of the job they currently have.

Orwell has this great phrase where he says, to see what is in front of one nose demands a constant struggle. And I think, staying focused on the job in front of you can actually allow you to have a huge impact. On a more practical set of recommendations, I would say, as a member of Congress, you have an enormous power to convene people in your district, in Washington DC, and it really is kind of a superpower, right?

And I've really enjoyed going around northeast Wisconsin and learning all about different businesses, nonprofits that I never would have had an occasion to go into, right? I would have just passed these non-descript, great buildings on my daily commute. And now I get to go in there, I get to learn about them, I get to meet the people, and it's almost, I've fallen in love with the country and my district again through the process.

And that can be very rewarding. And even just the daily constituent casework you do, helping someone get their Social Security benefits, helping someone get a call back from the VA, even solving a passport issue, it's super gratifying if you save somebody's family vacation. And so I just would encourage people to have a respect for the less glamorous side of the job.

And then finally, I think to the extent I've been able to have an influence or in kind of a shorter period of time go from young member to committee chair, it's because I write a lot every day. The first thing I do after I pray is I block off an hour to write.

And even if it doesn't result in an op ed or a long form journal article, it forces me to think through an issue. And I think that daily practice of writing will help you if you wanna become a Congressman, a governor, a senator, or even if you just wanna stay in business.

So I don't know if any of that makes sense, but those are a few things that stand out.

>> Bill Whalen: That makes a lot of sense, I have not checked the Packers' schedule. I don't know if they're coming out to San Francisco, this fall. But if you do come to the Bay Area, Congressman, I hope you spend a little time at the Hoover Institution.

We'd love to have you in future policy discussions.

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, the 9ers need to be renamed, because it is nowhere near San Francisco where that stadium is. It took me like an hour and a half to get there when I went to a game. But I love all the work that the Hoover Institution is doing.

Going on Goodfellows was some of the most fun I've had, despite just I feel like there's always some unfair attack from Neil or HR. And just the fact that Hoover is employing a washed up army general like HR, is an enormous public service. It's an act of profound charity.

And I just appreciate that, someone who suffered under his command when I was in uniform. I just appreciate everything you're doing to take care of him. I'm reminded of the song from White Christmas. What do you do with the general when he stops being a general? You should play that every time he comes on the podcast.

 

>> Bill Whalen: I think you need to come back on the show and remind him of that, Congressman.

>> Mike Gallagher: I'm sure I'll hear about it, and he knows I'm joking, so I love HR.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, well, look, thanks, it's been a fantastic podcast. Enjoy the speech tonight for whatever happens tonight, and most importantly, thank you for your service.

 

>> Mike Gallagher: Thank you, I enjoyed it, thanks for everything.

>> Bill Whalen: Thank you, Congressman. You've been listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, the Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the globe. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our show.

If you wouldn't mind, please spread the word, tell your friends about us. The Hoover Institution has Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds. Excuse me, X feeds, I should say, our X handle is @hooverinst. That's spelled, H-O-O-V-E-R-I-N-S-T, @hooverinst. Congressman Mike Gallagher is on the web as well. His address is gallagher.house.gov, let me repeat that.

Gallagher.house.gov, Gallagher spelled G-A-L-L-A-G-H-E-R, gallagher.house.gov. I mentioned our website beginning of the show, that's hoover.org. While you're there, I recommend that you sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, which keeps you updated on what my colleagues are up to. That's emailed to you weekdays. You can also sign up for Hoover's Podblast, which delivers the best of our podcast each month to your inbox and I hope this one makes the cut.

For the Hoover Institution, this is Bill Whalen. We'll be back soon with a new installment of Matters of Policy and Politics. We're gonna be talking California with my colleague Lee Ohanian, until then, take care, thanks for listening.

>> Speaker 3: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom.

For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.