Dick Armey

There are two of us in Congress.

One, uh, uh, obviously I'm one, and the other, Dick Armey, is majority leader.

The Democrats think that's two too many.

We've heard about flat taxes.

But it was a tool that was put into place in, uh, it, with the Contract with America in 1995 when the Republicans took the House for the first time in over 40 years.

And it was a North Dakotan, Dick Armey, who helped introduce the Congressional Review Act to provide an opportunity for Congress to put its fingerprint on the administrative state's over, uh, over, uh, uh, regulatory, uh, tendencies.

What we did as three members, we took the CRA and we applied it to not a rule, but a resource management plan.

When I introduced the C-- Julie introduced it in the House, John and I introduced it in the Senate, um, and, and when we introduced it, it had never been done.

And I know how Republicans used to do this.

And it's not it is this is not the Newt Gingrich, you know, Dick Armey.

version of the Republican Party.

I mean, that party is dead and gone.

Please enjoy responsibly.

On Capitol Hill, key congressional leaders are being evacuated outside of Washington, D.C. Several UH-1 Huey helicopters set down in the west lawn of the Capitol to embark Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and House Majority Leader Richard Armey, along with a select number of staff.

Speaker of the House Hastert is on his way to Andrews Air Force Base when he receives a call from Vice President Cheney, who tells him, "...you're going to an undisclosed location." Once he arrives at Andrews, Hastert climbs into a helicopter which lifts off and begins heading due west.

As the transport crosses the Potomac River, Hastert looks out the window and can see flames and smoke pouring out of the Pentagon.

They still used coded language, dog whistles.

But if you turn on AM Talk Radio, Fox News, people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and of course, the Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity and Dick Armey, who were funding the Tea Party, which was really a racist movement.

They were they were stoking the flames of bigotry.

I can remember listening to Sean Hannity, who was blaming this entire financial crisis that happened in 2008 on black people.

At the United States Capitol, members of Congress are now catching on to the situation in New York.

Brian Gunderson, Chief of Staff to House Majority Leader Richard Armey, will later say, We assumed it was a small plane.

I thought it was going to be more like the kind of event that dominates national news, but it doesn't really change what Congress does that day.

Like President Bush's entourage in Sarasota, Gunderson and the other staffers on Capitol Hill turn on the news to watch a live feed of the fire at the World Trade Center.

Ever since then, immigration reform has been muttered about in the Gingrich Congress, though nothing has been done about it.

Both Gingrich and Dick Armey, as well as the Clinton administration, are opposed to controlling legal immigration at all, and our beloved neoconservative friends are militantly opposed to any reform.

Indeed, as Morton Kondracke wrote in his column in Roll Call last year, it was William Kristol, now editor of the neoconservative Weekly Reader, excuse me, I mean the Weekly Standard [audience laughing] who, who, who persuaded Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett that it would be a terrific idea for them to come out against one eighty-seven on the eve of the election.

It was, in fact, a terrific idea, because more than anything else, the Kemp Bennett denunciation of one eighty-seven led to the collapse of their political careers.