Recently The New American interviewed Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona on a range of current issues. Congressman Biggs is one of the staunchest constitutionalists in Washington, with a perfect voting record in our Freedom Index. First elected by Arizona’s Fifth District in 2016, he is now serving his fourth term in office. Congressman Biggs is very engaged in the border issue because of how it is affecting his Arizona constituents. Because he is a member of both the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, he is also deeply involved in the investigation of the Biden family’s alleged bribery and influence-peddling scandal, as well as the weaponization by the Biden administration of government power. Here are some of his sobering thoughts on our growing national political and economic crisis — and prospects for resolving it.

Our discussion with Congressman Biggs is also available as a video at TheNewAmerican.com.

The New American: There’s a growing movement in the House to consider a formal vote or an impeachment inquiry because the Biden administration has been stonewalling, claiming that, in the absence of such a vote, it’s not really legitimate and that the sentiment even among so-called moderate Republicans is growing. What do you say about that?

Representative Andy Biggs: It’s a formality because we do have the authority, but we have run into roadblock after roadblock with this administration. And I think conservatives that have been watching have grown impatient, and I’ve been impatient as well. But we are seeing some language out of the more moderate side of our conference. I always think I’m moderate, but that’s with the more-liberal side of our conference. They now believe that it’s time to go forward. They think that we should go forward, and they think that we should do an impeachment inquiry. There are still going to be a couple or three that don’t get there. But I think the vast majority are going to get there, and I think it could happen pretty quickly. I think it’s going to happen next week that you’re going to see an impeachment inquiry vote. [Editor’s note: the House vote to formalize the impeachment inquiry did take place subsequent to this interview, on December 13, and passed by a margin of 221-212.]

TNA: A lot of the Republican old guard are saying that impeaching Biden is a terrible idea politically, that it’s going to backfire in the elections next year, and that we need to let go of it. What do you say to all of this? Do you think that he will, in fact, be impeached? And if so, how will that affect next year’s pivotal elections?

Biggs: I do think that you’ll get the impeachment inquiry vote, and I think it passes — probably. I haven’t whipped it, so I haven’t counted it. So there’s a high degree of likelihood that that passes. Then it would go through the Judiciary Committee, and the Judiciary Committee would take additional testimony publicly, and you’d probably have a couple of hearings on it there. And my guess is, you probably could get a referral to the floor, and the whole House to do an impeachment. And it wouldn’t surprise me if you end up with an actual floor impeachment proceeding sometime February-ish. And I don’t know if he gets impeached or not; I haven’t counted the votes. From looking at everything I’ve looked at — I sit on two committees that review that stuff — and even yesterday, I saw an email that came out from a bank examiner, from a U.S. bank that’s affiliated with China, that was basically saying, “look, they got five million from China to Hunter Biden and his company, and we can trace that directly going into Joe Biden’s account ultimately.” And the bank examiner’s saying, “look, there is no legitimate business going on here. There are also no loan documents. There’s nothing indicating that this is a loan.” So, there’s no loan, there’s no business going on. Where did the $5 million come from? And that’s not us asking it. That’s the bank examiners saying that they believe — at one point in the statement — that this looks like China is trying to influence the family members of a prominent political U.S. family.

TNA: The evidence does seems pretty blindingly obvious to us. But of course, the optics of the thing for the Democrats are going to be crucial given the narrow margin of error that you have to work with there. Based on the evidence that you have seen in your capacity — and you’re on the both the Oversight and Judiciary committees — do you think impeachment is warranted at this point? 

Biggs: I think that, demonstrably, Joe Biden was bribed. I mean, the timeline is clear, the flow of money is clear, the nexus seems clear. I think there was bribery there, and bribery is a constitutionally impeachable offense. And so, yes, that’s where I go. I think we can be that specific — that the Biden family, with Joe Biden, was bribed, and Joe Biden received benefit. His family received benefit, and he provided a consideration for that.

Partners in crime: President Biden and his son Hunter continue to defy subpoenas issued by Representative Biggs and his colleagues in their ongoing investigation of fathomless Biden corruption. (AP Images)

TNA: Moving on to another topic that’s on everyone’s minds at this point is the seemingly intractable problem of government spending, and the sort of ongoing ad hoc solution to it, which is the passing of continuing spending resolutions. We recently had a changing of the guard for House speaker. Mike Johnson is getting generally positive reviews, but one of his first acts as speaker of the House, and admittedly with only a couple of weeks on the job, was to try to solve yet another budget dispute, and his solution was, in effect, a two-tiered CR [continuing resolution]. And that’s obviously less than satisfactory to a lot of people. Going forward, do you think we will get to the long-promised point of going back to actual budgets and actual discrete spending bills, getting rid of omnibus spending, and getting rid of the abominable practice of CRs, or do you think that that’s politically unattainable at this point? And also, if you could, comment on Mike Johnson’s prospects for getting this done.

Biggs: A continuing resolution basically keeps the status quo of spending and policy in place until Congress does something else about the budget. And that’s why it’s so bad, because the levels we’re at are the Pelosi-Schumer-Biden levels that they put in last December. And that spending level left us with a $2 trillion-plus national structural deficit, which means that [as of] December 2023, we ... have more than $34 trillion in national debt. So that’s just a little context. Under the 1974 Budget Control and Impound Act, we are required to pass 12 stand-alone budget bills dealing with various sectors of our budget out of the House of Representatives by June 30 of every year. And as you and your listeners know, it’s a constitutional requirement that the spending originate in the House. And then we’re supposed to get it to the Senate; the Senate does their deal and it comes back; we do a conference committee and, by the end of the fiscal year, which is September 30, we do their budget.

The House has done eight of those bills. The Senate has done three that were supposed to be done by September... And so instead of finishing those, the speaker did a continuing resolution. The problem with that, of course, is he did it in two tiers, which was unusual, and I could have supported a two-tier proposition if he had done some other things besides just keep the spending level.

How about lowering the spending that went for Green New Deal projects in the last bill by Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi? They said that it would be $350 billion, and now the projection is over $2 trillion because they didn’t put a cap in there. They’re giving subsidies and tax credits and breaks. And so my position was, no, we can’t do that. You’re going to have to do something different. Even if you’re going to do something short-term, even if you’re going to do it for two tiers, you have to attempt — you have to actually bring the trajectory down and actually invoke our constitutional duty to move towards a balanced budget and do this properly.

It didn’t happen, so I voted no, of course. So the next question that you’re asking me is, is something going to happen to actually bend us to that, to get that done? Well, one of the reasons that I didn’t support that is because there was no leverage. Now there’s no leverage again, so everybody’s going to wait until when? Till January, and say, “okay, now let’s get serious”? They won’t get serious. I don’t believe it’s going to get done.

TNA: What you hear again and again about the defenders of the status quo is that the only thing Washington never runs out of is excuses. We’re running out of money, but the excuses continue to proliferate. And the current excuse is, “well, even if the House votes to do something, we can’t get it past the Senate.”

And so the overarching imperative, we are told, is that we need to keep the government running. We can’t consider actually shutting the government down. Because the Senate and the White House won’t blink, we’re helpless. What do you say to that? Do you think an actual shutdown is as traumatic as it’s portrayed to be by those opposed to it in the press and in Congress? And would it be something that might actually make a difference? 

Biggs: So let’s talk about that, just to get a little bit more context. Why is it that the Washington elite — the swamp, the establishment, the cartel, whatever you want to call it — why is it that they prefer to do this business by a continuing resolution (which, by the way, we’ve done more than 30 of those in the last 10 years, we’ve done over 120 of those in the last 25 years)? They want that because they keep control. Because we stop doing our duty and our due diligence. We don’t go in and ferret out all the corrupt, duplicative, wasteful programs and end them. 

When you put it on CR, it’s just on autopilot. And I always vote no on those, because I want access to the line-by-line. And my office did that; we go through this stuff line by line. We identified lots of things that should be reduced, removed, and eliminated. The swamp likes to keep that going on. They don’t want to do the 12 bills, because then they lose their control and their power and the money, and they don’t want a shutdown. And a shutdown is not the calamity that everybody thinks it is. The bottom line is this: All the mandatory spending — what they call mandatory here, which is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits — those keep going, right? 

TNA: Right.

Biggs: But what happens is, they’ll say, “Oh, we lost the parks, we’re going to have to shut down the parks.” And that’s what Obama did. Even though there was funding for parks, he put up barricades to prevent people from going to national parks, trying to get people mad and stop a shutdown. A shutdown is not cataclysmic. But I have proposed now for years that, if you’re afraid of a shutdown (which I am not, and a few of my colleagues are not) then let’s do it this way: Instead of programmatically just spending monolithically, why don’t you just identify what you think are the most necessary programs for the safety and protection of the U.S. citizens and their rights — Border Patrol, ICE, the military, the FAA, flight/air traffic controllers, TSA — and that’s what you fund. And then you can let everything else go by the wayside until Congress gets its act together and goes through and decides seriously what they want to do funding-wise.

Well, they won’t do that because the K Street lobbyists and the bureaucracies all lose their power and control. And so that’s why they don’t want a rational way to manage our spending, ratcheted down. It’s just too easy to just say, “we’ll keep going the way it is.”

TNA: So you’re saying that the will probably still isn’t there to go eyeball to eyeball with the Democrats and all of these establishment interests and say, “okay, enough is enough, we’re going to stop this” — which the House could do?

Biggs: That’s exactly right, and you describe it correctly. As I was going to people and asking them to just go ahead and shut this down, and force the Senate to take up our bills and consider them, they say, “Andy, we can’t have a shutdown.” And even the new speaker, when I went to him, said, “Andy, we can’t do a shutdown.” And my response is, “well, what is it you do want to do?” Because a shutdown is the strongest leverage point to bend the spending curve down, and until you start actually bending the spending curve down, you’ll continue to exacerbate the structural deficit problem we have, which means that you spend more money than you bring in, and worsen the national debt crisis that we have.

These are non-sustainable things. First of all, they’re unconstitutional, obviously, but they’re also just pragmatically not sustainable. And since they’re not sustainable, that puts us in an existential crisis. And then, until my colleagues are willing to stand up and deal with this existential crisis, we’re just going to keep heading off the cliff, just like the tank in that Indiana Jones movie where they’re fighting on top of the tank — and they’re going off the cliff, and not even realizing it.

TNA: One way or another, there’s going to be a shutdown. It will be either forced upon us by national insolvency sooner or later, or we can do it by choice in the form of a selective shutdown of those portions of government that are wasteful and unconstitutional. So, we still have a choice, but we may not have a choice for much longer.

Well, you mentioned the Border Patrol earlier. So I want to pivot to the border issue. You are from Arizona. I used to live in Tucson, so I have some feeling for what it’s like to live near the southern border. And I gather it’s gotten many times worse in the last couple of years, although [I’ve] not been down there recently.

But the House had the opportunity about two weeks ago to vote on a measure to impeach [DHS Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas, something that a lot of people have talked about. And in the end, it was voted down. This is an issue where there’s a very clear political consensus nationwide that what’s happening on the border is a disaster and something needs to be done about it. And yet, again, we see this paralysis in the House and the Senate and D.C. in general. Care to comment? Do you think that’s going to change?

Biggs: There’s so much I could tell you about the border, but I won’t talk about the particulars unless you specifically ask. But I’ll talk about process and what can be done to solve the border crisis. So, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “privileged resolution” to impeach Secretary Mayorkas came up and fell eight votes short. If I remember right, there were 11 or so members not on the floor — there were a couple that were ill, there were a couple that were not back in Congress for whatever reason. But you had eight that voted no. And those eight, had they, or most of them, voted yes, we would have passed that resolution and removed Mayorkas. Two of those, I don’t know that you’re ever going to get them to vote for it. I’ve been working on those guys for a couple of years, but they won’t budge. The other six, though, have since issued public statements saying that they would vote to remove Mayorkas.

So I, and Marjorie announced [November 29] that she’s reintroduced another privileged motion to remove Mayorkas. And if that’s the case, we have a shot at it — probably not this week, but probably next week — to go forward and try to do this again. And it is important, it is imperative, that we do this, because Secretary Mayorkas basically has lied to Congress. He’s lied to the American people. He’s made our country less safe. And since you used to live in Tucson — and I’m from Tucson originally — I can tell you, the Tucson sector, not last night, but the night before last, had over 2,700 apprehensions in one night alone. For the last five weeks, they’ve been averaging over 2,000 per day.

They do not have enough Border Patrol agents to actually patrol along the border and still transport and process. You know how remote some of those places are down there, and I will just tell you, some of these places, you have to drive two and a half, three and a half hours to get somebody to a processing facility. There are places that are really remote. There were 25 incredibly remote places that had 350 one day [recently]. 

So this is what you’re getting. And [Mayorkas] won’t be removed from office because the Senate won’t remove him, but we can impeach him. In one of the bills that we passed out of the House, we vacated his position, and the Senate has that bill over there. The question is, are they going to strip it out or not strip it out. And one of the people who voted no on this bill said he is probably the most dangerous Cabinet secretary in the history of the United States of America, and that guy still voted no. But I agree with that assessment. Secretary Mayorkas has changed this nation, perhaps unalterably, over time. And we now probably have 30 million-plus people illegally in this country.

TNA: No other country in the world does this — clearly, cynically, and shamelessly enabling an invasion of the country. And that’s blindingly apparent to all but the most partisan Democrats and tribalists of the Left.

It’s maddening from the point of view of the person on the street, to see these things happening. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to compel them to heel, even though in theory, Congress really should be the branch of government that’s setting immigration policy, setting the agenda, setting the rules according to the Constitution, but that’s not what’s going on now. It’s being driven purely by the executive branch, and no one in Congress seems to be willing to stand up to them.

Biggs: Well, this is the reason I wanted a partial government [shutdown] — and let’s just call it what it really is, it’s a lapse in appropriations. All of the agencies have a bunch of money. We would just be saying you can’t use that money yet. But the reason I wanted that is because … it doesn’t matter what policy we enact — I keep telling people this. You can enact any policy you want on the border. This is a lawless administration. Until you hit them in the pocketbook and tell them they’re not getting money until they [take steps to make meaningful cuts, and are held accountable, they will not do anything]. And no fake numbers. We want monitors, we want independent auditors, all of those things. If Congress doesn’t do that, it just simply doesn’t matter, they’re going to go around whatever policy you enact.

Even if Joe Biden signs H.R. 2, which is the Border Security Act, into law, he will find a way around it, because that’s what they do. And they want an open border. And so the best thing, when we come back to it, is that we’ve got two main checks in the Constitution. Number one is control of the purse strings — that’s where we do the checkbook governance. [Number two is] removing people from office who are so dangerous that you cannot wait until the next election because the damage is going to be so great otherwise.

TNA: In the time remaining, I want to touch quickly on a couple more issues. Issue number one: China, Taiwan, and the Philippines; where is that likely to go?

Biggs: Well, China is bellicose right now, and our friend in the White House, Joe Biden, is feckless and weak. He has allowed all the bad guys to exhibit incredible strength. I would not be surprised if China engages even more ferociously. But in some ways — and I’ve said this before many times — China really doesn’t gain any strategic advantage by taking Taiwan, no economic advantage, because the economies of China, mainland China and Taiwan, are so integrated already. And I don’t think that they want to do that while the U.S. still is the big dog.

The other thing is, with regard to the Philippines, we start looking at the South China Sea and this rapprochement that’s starting to take place between China and Philippines. Know this, that mainland China is trying to project power all over Southeast Asia, and that includes the Philippines, to try to drive them into their arms. And that’s where we sit right now in Southeast Asia.

TNA: All right. Well, moving on. You are a sponsor of H.R. 79 to get the United States out of the World Health Organization. What is your motive for doing that?

Biggs: Well, first of all, having done work in multilateral institutions, I don’t believe those are constitutional. America was meant to enter into bilateral relationships. And so, leaving the constitutional thing aside, multilateral institutions also hurt the U.S. strategically in that we have a tough time holding violators accountable. And the third thing is, the World Health Organization is a corrupt organization controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. And the director of the World Health Organization is absolutely controlled by China. And what they did in the Covid era demonstrated fully and totally how corrupt the World Health Organization is. And so we should be out of the World Health Organization.

I supported Donald Trump when he got us out of that. And I also recently introduced legislation just to stop the voluntary payments of hundreds of millions of dollars every year that we give to the World Health Organization; those aren’t even the assessments to the U.S. Let’s stop that. And I couldn’t even get the votes for that.

TNA: Well, everything you just said about the WHO applies to the entire United Nations system writ large. Would you support withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations?

Biggs: Oh absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I might have actually introduced one of those bills in the past to do that. Look, one of my deals when I was practicing law was that I actually represented NGOs and multilateral institutions — and that was not because I supported those institutions, but because I didn’t support those institutions — and I found them to be largely corrupt. And we should not be in the UN. You give up your sovereignty to the United Nations, and the UN is not a friend to the U.S., it has undermined us repeatedly, and it’s long past time that we should be out of the United Nations.

TNA: Well, it’s heartening to hear you say that. One last quick issue. This is something that a lot of people may not be aware of, but you have been very vocal in your opposition to movements to convene a new Constitutional Convention. Do you see any prospect of that happening anytime soon? And can you explain very briefly in the minute or so we have left why you’re opposed to a Con-Con, as it’s called?

Biggs: Well, you know, I’ve actually written a book on it called The Con of the Con-Con, which explains all my reasons. But I’ll just say this. You cannot control a Constitutional Convention. I know everybody’s tried to tell me otherwise, and I can defeat that in a healthy, fair debate, and have done many times, I believe. And right now, it is not a propitious time to have a Constitutional Convention. Why? Because, with the social media and the hard Left also wanting a Constitutional Convention, they will attack our constitutional rights. The better thing we need to do, in my opinion, is to rein in the federal government, get rid of the 17th Amendment and the 16th Amendment, reinvigorate state sovereignty to work as a vertical check against the federal government, and then I think we can restore our constitutional integrity.

TNA: Thank you so much, Congressman. I appreciate your time.

Biggs: Thank you. It’s good to be with you.