Politicians Keep Changing the Deal After You Vote | Freedom Friday

🤝 Every policy begins with a handshake.

The problem is that Americans rarely receive the same deal they originally agreed to.

This week Chad examines one pattern that connects California's bullet train, the border wall, mental health reform, Oregon's Measure 110, broadband expansion, nuclear waste storage, and even an old telephone tax.

The promises rarely disappear.

They slowly become a different version.

In this episode:

•  Why politicians celebrate announcements instead of completions 
•  California's high-speed rail transformation 
•  How the border wall became the "Smart Wall" 
•  The forgotten second half of America's mental health promise 
•  What Oregon's Measure 110 reveals about unfinished policy 
•  Broadband money that still hasn't connected homes 
•  Why government often finishes the inexpensive half while abandoning the expensive half 
•  Reagan's overlooked lesson about self-government 

The real question isn't whether government changes.

It's whether anyone ever asks permission before changing the deal.

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 252-CHAD-LAW (252-242-3529)

📚 Books:
 • The Price of Progress
 • The Velvet Monopoly
 • The Cost of Certainty

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Chapters

00:00 The Ceremony Before the Work
 03:22 The Handshake vs. The Version
 08:05 California's Bullet Train Swap
 18:31 When Promises Quietly Change
 25:12 The Border Wall That Became Cameras
 36:27 Mental Health's Broken Handshake
 47:54 Oregon Measure 110 Revisited
 56:18 Broadband, Nuclear Waste & Endless Programs
 01:05:47 The Arithmetic of Government
 01:11:54 Why America Used to Celebrate Finishing
 01:18:36 Reagan Reminder: You're the Driver

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

January sixth, twenty fifteen, Fresno, California. Twelve hundred people, invitation only. There's a podium, there's a crowd, there's a governor. Jerry Brown walks up to break ground on California's bullet train. Except he doesn't break any ground. There's no shovel. They hand him a piece of steel rail, and he signs it. Signs it like a yearbook. And there were kids from Fresno State who'd made up a hashtag for the occasion. Hashtag I will ride. That was the pitch. Right there on a poster board in a kid's handwriting, I will ride. That was 11 years ago, folks. Nobody has ridden. Now, I'm not making fun of those kids. Don't do that. They believed it. Somebody told them something and they believed it. And in a country like this, that's exactly what you're supposed to do. It's the ceremony I can't get past. Because we do this constantly. The gold shovels, the little hard hats nobody's ever gonna wear, the dirt that got pre-loosened by an intern at six in the morning so the senator doesn't pull something reaching for it. There's a photographer, there's a ribbon, there's a grown man whose entire job that day, his whole job is to hold the giant scissors. And then everybody goes home. So let me ask you something. In your whole life, your entire life, have you ever once seen a politician call a press conference to announce that something was finished? Not started, but finished. There's no ribbon cutting for a final inspection. Nobody throws a gala the day the audit comes back clean. There's no gold shovel for we did the thing we said we'd do. We used to be a country that drove a golden spike and telegraphed one word done. And church bells rang in towns that had never even seen a railroad. Now we sign the rail and we leave. Hold on to that one. So when did this happen? When did America stop celebrating what we finished and start celebrating what we announced? And before we get going, quick thing. If common sense has become part of your week, ChadparkerLaw.com is home base. Everything we build lives there. And this week, since we're about to spend an hour on the gap between what you were promised and what showed up, go grab the free Common Sense Conservative Manifesto while you're there. It's free. Which, I'm told, is fewer strings than most things Washington hands out. If you've got a question, an episode idea, or you think I blew it, call or text me at 252 Chad Law. The best conversations on this show start with your messages. All right, we'll be right back.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

When you need common sense, come see Chad Law, the boldest pundit you ever saw. It's true to truth. It's hard and the talk is real. Reality rules, and that's the appeal. Spreading truth. That's this card opening eyes. Who needs a part when you need common sense then comes to cat? He lays down the law when the lights get bad. So come where it's real with common sense.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality, broadcasting truth on the only rainbow that matters: the red, white, and blue rainbow. And this America is common sense. The show where we read the fine print so you don't have to, where we bring receipts instead of outrage, where politics is just the start of a much bigger conversation. This is the show where results matter, reality has a vote, truth has a vote, common sense matters. So welcome home. All right, let's get into today's episode. All right, so I want to start with that train, and then I want to show you something that's gonna bother you for about a week. This is not an episode about trains, FYI. I love trains, by the way, but this is not a train episode. It's not an episode about government waste either. You've heard that one from me. Everyone's done that one. Cable News does that one every night at seven, and it has never changed a single thing in this country. Tonight, this episode is about a handshake. Here's what I mean. In 2008, Californians got offered a deal, not a vibe, not a direction, a deal, with numbers in it, and they voted on it. Proposition 1A. Real ballot, real money, a real yes. And what's out there in the dirt today is not that deal. It's not a slower version of that deal. It's not a more expensive version of that deal. It's a different thing wearing the same name. Which brings up a question I could not put down all week. And it is not, why does government take so long? Boring, everybody's asked that. Nobody's once ever been surprised by the answer. My question is this. At what point did it stop being the thing they shook hands on? Was there a day? Was there a meeting? Was there a vote? Did one human being ever come back around to the people who actually paid for it and say, hey, the product's changed substantially. You still in? Or did it sort of happen quietly? While everyone was busy living their actual lives. Hold that, because in the next hour you're gonna watch the exact thing happen to a wall, to a promise this country made after one of the most shameful broadcasts in American television history, to a ballot measure right here in Oregon, and a line item on your electric bill that you have never once looked at. And then I'm gonna tell you why it keeps happening. And spoiler alert, it isn't stupidity, it isn't even corruption. It's simpler than that, and it's worse than that. And once you see it, you're gonna see it every day for the rest of your life. You're welcome. So let's start on the tracks. Well, what there is of them, as anyways. Put yourself back in 2008 and do it honestly, not the cynical version, the real version. Because in 2008, this was a beautiful idea. I mean that. You're a Californian, I was. You're sitting on the five doing 11 miles an hour, or you're paying whatever number Southwest invented for you that week to fly SF to LA, shoes off, belt off, get wanded, the whole indignity, and somebody walks up to you with a picture of a gleaming silver bullet train. And the promise was specific. That's what matters here. It was not vague. San Francisco to Los Angeles, downtown to downtown in two hours and 40 minutes, city center to city center, faster than driving and faster than flying once you count the airport circus. Around $33 billion carrying passengers by 2020. They put those exact words on the ballot. Californians looked at the picture and the price and the date and said yes, and voted for billions and bonds on that train to those cities at that price by that year. And good for them. A fast, clean train between your two biggest cities is a great thing to want. Nobody should be embarrassed about voting yes on that. Now, the ceremony. 2015 Fresno, the one I told you about, and I went back and read what people actually said that day because the celebration is where the promise gets set in stone. Governor Brown at the podium, the high speed rail links us from the past to the future. From the south of Fresno and North. This is truly a California project bringing us together. The EPA put out a release that same week saying that by 2029 the system is expected to run from San Francisco to the Los Angeles basin in under three hours. They actually compared it to the Hoover Dam. They compared it to the Golden Gate Bridge. There were construction workers standing there in hard hats who did not need hard hats. And then my favorite moment of the whole event, and I want to read this one slow because Jerry Brown might have been the only honest man on that stage. He admitted out loud in his own remarks that he had his words, some doubts about this project. And then he asked out loud in front of everybody, where the hell are we gonna get the rest of the money? And then he answered himself, Don't worry about it. We're gonna get it. That was all in his speech at the celebration. And to me, that's not a groundbreaking, that's a guy signing a mortgage he hasn't read. But he said something else that day, and this one's the whole episode, and I've got to hear it. He said, quote, it's not about money. You've got to get something in the ground. You've got to put the building tradespeople to work. You've got to get something in the ground. Not finish it, not deliver it, but get something in the ground. Because getting something in the ground is the part that comes with a podium. So it's 2026. That train was supposed to be carrying passengers six years ago. 17 years of work, more than $18 billion actually spent, and the number of miles of high-speed track laid in the state of California is drumroll. Zero. Not behind schedule. Zero. Not a mile. Last summer, the Federal Transportation Secretary pulled about four billion dollars back and called it a train to know it where. Sixteen years, fifteen billion federal dollars, no track. In December, California quietly dropped its lawsuit over the money. In February, Congress permanently rescinded another $929 million. In March, the chairman of the project's own peer review group called it a dead end. The project's own guy said dead end. But forget the delay. The delay's the boring part. Watch what happened to the thing itself. They shook with the voters on San Francisco to LA. The stretch they're fighting to finish today runs Merced to Bakersfield. And if those two don't exactly leap to mind when you picture California's two great cities, you're not crazy. That's the middle. I grew up calling it California's armpit. The train now connects the part of the drive you used to sleep through. They shook on downtown to downtown, and the cheapest version left on the table saves money by moving the stations out of downtown, out of Bakersfield, out of Merced, onto cheaper open dirt outside of town because building into the actual cities got too expensive. So it's a downtown to downtown train that skips the downtowns. They also shook with the voters on 2020. They stripped down the version as penciled now for 2040. A baby born the year Californians voted on this thing will be old enough to run for president before it carries a single passenger. And now listen to how the words moved. Because the words always move first, always. Bullet train became phased implementation. Connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco became the initial operating segment. And this past June, when a global investment consortium signed on to help, they didn't sign on to finish the train. They signed on to help, and this is the actual language, commercialize the assets. Commercialize the assets? That's a real estate portfolio. That's a phrase you use at a WEWORC. No human being in the history of trains has ever said that about a train. Oh, and in February, the state rolled out its newest plan, and the number they led with, the thing they were proud of, was that they found a way to cut the cost by $1.7 billion off a project that's blown past its budget by something like a hundred billion. That's not a discount. That's a hostage note with a coupon staple to the front. Now, let me be fair. This is Freedom Friday, not a hit job, and there's a real defense here, if you count it. Big infrastructure is brutal. 17 years is a long time, and inflation is real. A $2008 doesn't buy a $2,008 worth of concrete. Environmental review is real. Buying land parcel by parcel off a thousand different owners is real, and it is slow. At the time of the groundbreaking, they'd acquired about a hundred of the five hundred and twenty-five parcels they needed just for the first segment. Lawsuits happen, engineering hands you problems nobody saw on day one. And building a giant thing in phases starting in the middle where it's cheapest? Well, that can be the responsible call. Serious people will sit with a straight face and tell you that Central Valley Spine is the smart way to start. So they're not really lying to you, and I'll give them every bit of that. It's the smart way to start because it's the cheaper way to start. But my question was never how dare the plans change. That's a child's question. Plans change. Sometimes plans should change. My question is when it changed this much, when it stopped being the thing the people shook hands on, where was the moment somebody came back and asked? Where was the second campaign? Where was the Prop 1A do-over? Where was the 30-second spot that said, hey, California, quick update? It's not SF to LA anymore. It's Merced to Bakersfield. Stations moved out of town, and we're looking at 2040. It's about triple the price. You still in? There wasn't one. There was never a moment. 17 years, and not one person was ever required to stop, turn around, and get permission for the swap. They shook on one thing, they got a version of that. And none of that needed a villain. Nobody twirled a mustache. It moved an inch a year for 17 years, which is exactly why nobody noticed. I mean, think about it. If somebody had walked up to Californians in one shot and said, here's the new deal, sign here, they'd have thrown a fit. Riots in the streets, recall petitions. So nobody ever asked at all once. Because the important decisions in this country don't get made at the podium. They get made after the cameras leave. Now you're already doing it. I can feel you out there through the camera doing it. You're going, okay, Chad, that's California. Blue State, Boondoggle, that's them. Careful. Because California just made the amateur move. They poured theirs out of concrete in an open field in broad daylight where any of us can drive past it. So let me show you one on our side that we all cheered for. June 16th, 2015, Trump Tower, the escalator. You remember exactly where you were. And he said the thing. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words. Mark my words. Kind of like read my lips. Okay, let's mark them. And I'm gonna do this one on my own side of the aisle because you've watched the show for more than a week. You know that's where I aim hardest. Auditing Democrats is easy. They're so far gone. Anyone can do that. Auditing your own is the only kind that counts for anything. And here's my starting point, and I'm not walking it back. The promise was popular because the problem was real. It was not invented. People in border communities were not imagining it. So look at the handshake. It was specific. A wall, concrete, big, beautiful, thousand plus miles. And Mexico pays. Now watch the versions stack up. Version two, the concrete becomes steel bowled fencing and slats, and Mexico is not paying. You are. Version three, and this is the one nobody talks about. July of 2019, 30 months in, Customs and Border Protection confirms to reporters that not one mile of new wall has gone up where none existed before. Everything completed to that point was in the agency's own words, in place of dilapidated designs. Replacement, and that's not some left-wing outfit reporting it. That ran in the Washington Examiner and on Fox News. By the end of that first term, the total was about 458 miles built. Sounds enormous, right? Well, of that, about 52 miles were new primary barrier in places that had nothing before. The rest replaced smaller, older, dilapidated barrier, which adds no new coverage to the border, none. So the Great Wall was mathematically mostly a renovation. Version 4 halted in 2021, materials sitting in the dirt, rusting, some of it eventually just sold off. Version five, restarted and renamed, and this is where it gets good, and I need you to go look this up yourself because you're not going to believe me. Go to Customs and Border Patrol's website. The program is now officially called the Smart Wall. Smart Wall. Same move as phased implementation. Same move as commercialize the assets. The vocabulary always moves before the project does, always. In version six, here's what smart wall actually means. Every one of these numbers is off the CBP's own map page, not mine, theirs. About 538 miles of technology being deployed in places that already have a barrier, and about 205 miles of detection technology in the big bend section, and another roughly 167 miles of border with no barrier at all, covered instead by non-wall detection technology because the terrain is unfavorable or too remote. So added up by the government's own accounting, 372 miles of the border covered by detection technology alone. 372 miles of wall, that is, cameras. And who's building it? This past June, Andrew announced a $363 million contract with CPB for more than 200 extended range sentry towers. They're 80 feet tall with thermal radar AI that detects and classifies and tracks objects past five miles out. They've already got 350 plus of the standard towers up, hit their 300th back in 2024. By the company's own count, they cover about 30% of the southern land border. It's a seven-year partnership, and they're putting up more than 15 cameras a month. Meanwhile, roughly 30 miles of actual new wall completed since January of 2025, and about 1,168 miles of proposed structure still sitting in planning. And the fair case, which you're owed, I always do. That replacement fencing was not a scam. Swapping a three-foot Normandy vehicle barrier, which stops a truck and does absolutely nothing to stop a man on foot, or 18-foot still bowlard is a genuine upgrade. That's real. Some of that terrain cannot be walled. You're not running concrete through certain stretches of the Rio Grande or the Big Bend Canyons. That's not politics, it's just geology. And the towers work. Hundreds of thousands of detections. If situational awareness is the only goal, the technology is arguably better than a wall itself. I'll grant them all of it. And I'm not against that. Again, not the point. None of that is what was on that escalator in 2015. Nobody chanted for a sensor. There was never in the history of this republic been a rally where 15,000 people stood up and shouted, build that layered autonomous detection network. And nobody, nobody went back to the people who voted for that promise and said, quick update. It's not concrete. Mexico isn't paying. Most of what we built replaced what was already there, and 372 miles of it is gonna be an 80-foot AI tower pointed at a stretch of America where actual American citizens live and ranch and raise their kids. You still in? They shook on one thing. We got a version. Now notice something, because this is where the episode turns. Ask yourself why it drifted in that particular direction. Why cameras instead of concrete? Because a wall can be finished. You can photograph a finished wall. You can count it, you can walk a reporter down it, and the day you finish it the money stops. A surveillance network is a subscription. Towers, software, sustainment, upgrades, replacements, service agreements, renewals. 15 more a month. Forever. Nobody who sells that ever wants. A ribbon cutting because the ribbon cutting is the day the invoices end. One of those has a completion date, the other has a billing cycle. Hold that because now I'm going to show you what happens when the math runs the other direction. In 1972, Geraldo Rivera takes a camera crew in the side of Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. Somebody had slipped him a key. I'm not going to describe what was on that tape. It doesn't need it, and you don't need it. Children, overcrowded wards, filth, almost no actual care happening at all. He called it the last great disgrace. Millions of Americans watched it, and this country did something I think we should be proud of. It got angry correctly. And let me say this plainly because I don't want one person to misread me tonight. Closing those places was right. Willowbrook was not a policy disagreement, it was a horror. Anyone who watched that broadcast and concluded those wards should stay open is missing something in their chest. By Barry Penhurst, same story, the outrage was earned. The lawsuits were earned, and on September 17th, 1987, Willowbrook was declared officially and forever closed. That was a win, a real one, an American win. So that's where this version starts. Not at the closing, after it. Because again, the closing was only half the deal we shook on. Rewind of the promise underneath it. October nineteen sixty three, President Kennedy signs the Community Mental Health Act, one of the last bills he ever signed. And Kennedy is blunt about what he's replacing. He calls the existing system an antiquated, vastly overcrowded chain of custodial state institutions. Here's the deal he offered the country. We close those places and we build the replacement. Federal money to construct 1,500 community mental health centers, a network coast to coast with outpatient clinics, emergency psychiatric care, partial hospitalization, and community education. And the vision, this is the part that gets me, a place in every single community, so that when somebody's son or daughter came out of one of those wards, there was somewhere for them to go. That was the handshake. Two halves. Close the institutions, build the care. So which half do you think got finished? The institutions closed completely, permanently, ceremonially even officially and forever closed. Reagan actually finally did that. And those 1,500 promised centers roughly half were ever built. Now here's the mechanism. One sentence, and this one sentence explains 60 years of American sidewalks. The Act paid to construct the centers. It did not pay to operate them. They funded the building, not the running of the building, not the staffing of it in year nine or year twenty or year forty. And the ones that did open drifted. They ended up serving only milder cases, the short term stuff, instead of the chronic serious mental illnesses that state hospitals had actually been holding. So even the half that got built wasn't doing the job it was built for. Then the money got weird. 1965, Medicaid arrives, and Medicaid will pay for care in a nursing home or a community setting, but not in a state psychiatric hospital for a working age adult. So now every state in America has a direct financial incentive to empty those wards faster than the replacement is going up. And later, under the Reagan administration, and what was left on that federal funding got converted into a block grant. States spent it however they wanted. So here's where we are. We closed them. We were right to close them, and the thing we promised to build instead got half built, underfunded, and pointed at the wrong problem, and then eventually handed off to 50 states with a shrug. And the rest of that is not an abstraction. It's not a chart in a think tank PDF. You can see it from your car driving through any one of America's cities. The largest mental health institutions in the United States of America today are jails. Cook County, LA County, Rikers, that is not a metaphor. Our jails and prisons hold far more people with serious mental illness than our psychiatric hospitals do. And what doesn't end up in a cell ends up in a tent on a sidewalk in front of somebody's business in every city in this country, and we drive past it every single day, and we've gotten so used to it that we've stopped seeing it at all. We told a generation of people we were taking them out of a nightmare and giving them a community. We all voted for it rightly and supported it. We took them out of the nightmare, the part we finished because it was popular and there were cameras, and simply moved them onto the street. And if you're still sitting there thinking that's a story from your grandparents' era that we learned something that we'd never make that trade again, let me take you to my own backyard, because Oregon ran the same exact play six years ago. November 2020, measure 110 goes on the ballot. 58% of Oregonians vote yes. And go read the actual title of the thing. The title is the handshake. The Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act. Treatment and recovery. Two halves again. Half one, stop putting people in a cage for possession. Half two, and this was written into the measure with a date on it, funded by marijuana tax money. Build the addiction recovery centers. Physical centers, treatment available 24 hours a day. And the state required them by October 1st, 2021. So guess which half showed up on time? Decriminalization took effect February 2021 instantly because ending a penalty requires exactly one thing, a signature. It's free and it happens overnight. Oh, but the treatment side, by a June 2022 audit, eight months past the legal deadline, roughly $302 million earmarked for recovery services. About $278 million had not even reached the providers yet. $278 out of 302. And I want to be careful here because there's a real fight about what Measure 110 did and didn't cause. People argue about whether it drove the overdose numbers or whether that was fentanyl showing up at the same time. That's a legitimate argument, and I'm not adjudicating that tonight. But here's what's remarkable. On the delivery question, everybody agrees. Supporters and opponents both. The people who wanted it repealed said it, and the people who defended it said it too. They just called it a leadership failure and a bungled rollout. Tina Kotek, now our lovely governor, said at the time that the state, quote, failed to deliver the promised treatment programs fast enough. You think? Betsy Johnson said people are literally dying while state government fails to show up with the services this ballot measure promised. Christine Dresden, the disaster GOP candidate running for governor, called it disastrous rollout and false promises. So nobody on any side is arguing this part. The half that took a signature happened. The half that took a construction site didn't. So in 2024, the legislator passed House Bill 4002, bipartisan 51 to 7 in the House, and rolled the decriminalization back, signed April 1st, and then by something like 60% of Orgonians had come around thinking the whole thing was a mistake. But look at what actually happened to those voters. They shook on a treatment and decriminalization. They got decriminalization without treatment, which is nobody's idea of a good plan, including the people who wrote it. And then the legislator took back the half they did get. And at no point did anyone put the real deal on a ballot again. They shook on one thing, they got another version. All right, and rapid fire, because you're holding this thing, you start seeing it everywhere, and I want to do three fast ones that are already on your bills today. Number one, your internet. 2020-21, the infrastructure law, $42.5 billion for rural broadband. And the branding on it, I love this, was internet for all. All, targeting about 8.5 million unserved locations, another 3.5 million underserved, things like farms, small towns, tribal land, the places private companies skipped. That was five years ago. The number of households connected by that program to date? Zero. This past April 2026, it was finally announced as operational, meaning now states get six months to finalize contracts, then environmental reviews, then maybe construction starts. And in the rewrite, roughly $22 billion of it got set aside for what the government calls non-deployment uses. Non-deployment. More than half the money for internet for all is now earmarked for not laying internet. And it's expected to reach fewer homes than originally promised. So if you're out on a gravel road tonight watching this thing buffer, that's your $42 billion working exactly as designed. Number two, your electric bill. 1982, Congress passes the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The deal, the federal government will build one permanent safe repository for this country's nuclear waste. They pick Yucca Mountain, Nevada in 1987, and the government legally obligated itself to start taking that waste by a hard date, January 31st, 1998. And who paid for it? You did, I did. There was a fee, a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour on the electric bills of customers in 35 states. About $750 million a year quietly for decades. That fund reached forty four point three billion dollars. Amount of nuclear waste stored at Yucca Mountain? None. It was never built. Budget zeroed out in 2020, and in 2014 a federal court ordered the government to stop collecting the fee on the grounds that you can't keep charging people for a thing you have no plan to deliver. So the waste stayed where it is, sitting in pools and dry casks at power plants all over this country, which is exactly what the repository was supposed to prevent. The utilities sued for breach of contract and won, and the damages, about 8.6 billion so far, come out of the Treasury's judgment fund. Which, again, is you and me. You paid on your power bill for permanent storage. Now you pay through your taxes for the temporary storage instead. Congressman John Schinkas called that fee, this annual theft of $750 million from electricity consumers. Theft, a sitting congressman describing a line on your utility statement. Oh, and the government still spends around $12 million a year on Yucca Mountain. Security, legal, maintaining the data. We are paying annual upkeep on a hole we never dug. Next one, number three, your phone. 1898. The Spanish American War. Congress needs money, so it passes a temporary tax on telephone service. Patriotic, fund the war. That war lasted about five months. The tax lasted until 2006. 108 years. Roughly $128.6 billion collected. And what matters is not the length, it's the reason we kept charging. World War I, keep it. World War II, keep it. Korea, keep it. Until it wasn't funding a war at all, it was just revenue for free for the government. It started as a luxury tax on the handful of rich people who owned telephones. It died taxing the phone in every teenager's back pocket. And nobody can tell you the day it stopped being a war tax and just became a tax because there was no day. There was no vote. There was only accumulation. When they finally killed it, Congressman Ed Royce noted that only Washington could stretch a tax a hundred and two years. And only Washington would tax talking. Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill, and your grandfather was still paying for it on his phone bill. So, five stories, a train, a wall, a promise about mental health care, a ballot measure, and three lines on your bills. And here's the thing I could not shake all week. I went into this assuming the answer was that government is bad at finishing things, incompetent, slow. You know the routine, you've heard it your whole life. That's wrong. And you can prove it's wrong with the stories I just told you. Because government did not fail to finish in every direction. It moved like lightning on some of it. Those institutions closed completely permanently. Decriminalization and organ took effect overnight. The concrete wall became a technology contract almost effortlessly. When Washington wants to finish something, Washington can absolutely finish something. So look at which halves got done in all of those. Closing the wards saves money. Done. Ending a criminal penalty costs nothing. Done overnight. A permanent surveillance subscription makes somebody money forever. Booming. Now let's move to the other column. Building 1,500 community mental health centers and staffing them for 60 years costs money forever. Only half built. Recovery centers with illegal deadline costs money? Never showed up. Running fiber to a farmhouse at the end of a gravel road costs money? Zero ever got laid. Digging a permanent hole in a mountain costs money? Never dug. Finishing a bullet train costs money and ends the program. Zero miles. Government only completes whatever half saves money and ban and abandons whatever half costs money because that money always ends up somewhere else. And you voted for the package. That's it. That's the machine. It doesn't need a villain, it doesn't need a conspiracy, it doesn't need which party's in charge because it isn't ideology. It's arithmetic. Ending something takes a signature. Building something takes a construction site and a budget and staff, and somebody's still carrying in year 11, long after the podium's been folded up and the people who made the promise have moved on to their next announcement. Signatures happen. Construction sites drift. And money, which gets into a hole and earmarked, gets stolen, disappears. So what do we do with that? I'm not sending you home with government should do less. You've heard that your entire life, and it has never once fixed this problem. Here's what I want instead. It's smaller, but it's harder. When somebody sells you a package, and it is always a package, it's always two halves, the popular half and the expensive half, the question is never do I like this. The question is which half of this needs a construction site and who's gonna make sure that half gets built after everyone stops paying attention? Because you already know which half shows up on its own. And before you decide this is just what government is, that it's the water we swim in always has been. I want to take you back to the spike. Because I promised you we'd come back. May tenth, eighteen sixty nine. Promontory summit in Utah Territory, two locomotives nose to nose. And they'd done something I still find remarkable. They wired the telegraph line directly to the last spike. So when the hammer came down, the entire country could hear it live in every telegraph office in America. Then out goes one message, one word. Done. And Philadelphia rings its church bells. Chicago fires a hundred gun salute. People pour into the streets in Sacramento and in Omaha because a six month journey across this continent had just become a seven day train ride, and seventeen hundred and seventy-six miles of track built by tens of thousands of Irish and Chinese immigrants was finished. My favorite part, which I did not know up until this week, Leland Stanford swung the ceremonial mall and that golden spike and missed it completely. Whiffed in front of the entire nation. A railroad worker had to step in and drive it home. Which is somehow the most American detail in the whole story. The guy who actually built it, finishing the job, the dignitary flubbed. Or go to 1931, the Empire State Building. 410 days start to finish, in the teeth of the Great Depression, steel going up four and a half stories a week, structurally complete, 12 days ahead of schedule, under budget at about 41 million dollars. And May first, Al Smith stood at the Fifth Avenue entrance with his two young grandchildren and cut a ribbon while President Hoover pressed a button down in Washington and lit the whole thing up. Now look at what those two ceremonies have in common. The ribbon was at the end. The telegraph was at the end. The party was the day the thing worked. And I want you to notice what that does. See, you can't fake a finish. You can spin a groundbreaking all day long, but the day you tell a county done, the country can walk over and check. That's not nostalgia, folks, that's an accountability mechanism. And we traded it for a photo op. So one spike gets wired to a telegraph so a nation can hear it finished, and one spike gets signed, like a yearbook at the start of a train that still doesn't exist. Same object, opposite ends of the job, and somewhere in between those two ceremonies is the whole problem. When the train stops being the train, when the wall becomes a camera, when the treatment never opens its doors, somebody should have to come back. Stop, explain what changed, hold today's version up against the original promise, and ask you again. That's not anti-government. That's just how a handshake works between adults. You are always owed the deal you shook on, not version number seven. And I'll tell you the part that actually gets me, and then I'll let you go. It isn't the money. It was never the money. I'm a business guy. Projects run over, life happens. I've eaten cost overruns. I've had to go back to a client and say the thing changed. That's not a scandal. That's a Tuesday. What gets me is the people who were promised the second half. Those kids in Fresno with the hashtag, the rancher waiting on decent internet. The family in 1972 watched that broadcast with the rest of the country and believed, genuinely believed, that when those doors closed, there was going to be somewhere for their sons and daughters to go. They kept their end. We all keep our end, all of them. We show up, we vote, and we paid the fee on the bill every month without ever once being asked. The least we owe them is somebody standing at a podium one time, one time, saying, Here's what we promised, here's what we delivered, here's the difference. Nobody's ever going to throw that ceremony. There's no gold shovel in it for them. But that's the one I'd go to. Which brings me to Reagan. Not the Reagan on the coffee mug, a quieter one, if you will. His last speech from the Oval Office, January 1989, nine days before he goes home. And when people quote that farewell, they always grab the shining city part. That's not the part I want tonight. Because a little earlier in that same speech, he says what might be the most important sentence about self-government any president has ever said out loud. He's talking about the Constitution. And he says, quote, We the people tell the government what to do. It doesn't tell us. We the people are the driver, the government is the car, and we decide where it should go and by what route and how fast. We're the driver. The government's the car. And think about every story tonight. Not one of them was the car refusing to move. The car moved. It just quietly took a different route than the one you gave it. And it never mentioned it because you stopped watching the road. A driver doesn't pick a destination once and then fall asleep. A real driver kept checking. Are we still on the road we chose? Is this still the way home? That glance up the road? That's the thing we quit celebrating. We fell in love with the naming, the destination, and we forgot that driving means watching where you're actually going. So take the wheel back. Not with anger, with attention. Because that's the only thing self-government has ever asked of you. Then every once in a while you look up from the road of your own busy life and make sure the car is still going where you said. That's our show. If you see us, share us. Somebody in your life is worn out from being told they have to pick between two bad ideas. This is their seat, too. I'm Chad Law reminding you you're the driver. And this, America, has been common sense. If you're on Rumble, stick around about 10 seconds, and I'm gonna go answer all the questions you guys texted in during the live broadcast.

SPEAKER_02 45:44

Marvel that you should care for me. Yes, you've made my life so glamorous. You can't blame me for this one the boost. It's so marvelous that you should change the book. It's one marble that's story as it's glance.