Navigated to A Historic Year of Victories - Transcript

A Historic Year of Victories

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1

Welcome in as verdict with Centator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you and Senator This is one of those fun shows we get to do towards the end of the year, and that's talking about the GOP open up a canawhoop pay on the Democrats, especially in the Senate.

We had big wins for the American people that are going to have a real impact, especially on a lot of Americans millions in twenty twenty six from many of the laws that were passed are actually enacted on a scala one to ten.

Speaker 2

How excite are you about the results from this year?

Speaker 3

Thirty seven?

Speaker 2

Thirty seven?

Okay, I like that.

Speaker 4

Look this year, it is not an exaggeration to say we had historic victories in the Senate.

We had victories at a order of magnitude we've never seen.

And so this show, we're just going to walk through all of the victories we've.

Speaker 3

Won in the Senate.

Speaker 4

I'll tell you, in my thirteen years in the Senate, I have never had a year like this with so many major victories, with how many accomplishments that are lasting and transformational and and and look we came in and started the year with President Trump being sworn in and the Trump administration hit the ground running with with a head of steam.

But the Senate and the Senate is now, Congress is out now for Christmas.

We'll come back after New Years.

What we accomplished this year is transformation.

All right.

Speaker 3

Let's start with the board.

We came in.

Speaker 4

The border was wide open, the worst illegal immigration in history.

We now have a president and an administration that will follow the law.

Illegal border crossings dropped more than ninety nine percent.

Speaker 2

That is static, incredible.

Speaker 1

Tom Holman at the White House this week was talking about he's worked under I think it's five six presidents.

Crazy and he's like, I've never seen something like this where we have like zero illegal immigration because we secured it and we said you're not going to get away with it.

Speaker 4

And if you look legislatively, by far, legislatively, the biggest accomplishment was the Reconciliation Bill that President Trump signed on July fourth.

It's interesting that used to be called the one big beautiful bill.

You will now see just about every Senator referring to it as the working Family's tax cut.

Same bill, and there's a reason, which is they did a bunch of polling and the Working Family Tax Cut polls about forty points better than the one big beautiful bill, And so it happens to be a major tax cut for working family.

So the Working Family's tax cut is an accurate name.

But you're going to notice everyone calling it the working Family's tax cut.

Now that legislation, and this no hyperbole, has more conservative victories in it than any bill that's ever passed into law, I believe in the history of the Republic.

Speaker 3

Let's break it down.

Speaker 1

I'll just say, what are the big ones for bal Because there's some in there that there's been quote frustration.

I think a lot of this is the left in the media trying to drum up that Donald Trump's not getting it done for you.

Speaker 2

He forgot about you.

Speaker 1

So much of what people need to understand is the passing of this bill means the enacting of the bill in twenty twenty six.

Speaker 4

Yeah, many of the provisions go into effect in twenty twenty six.

You're going to start seeing the real benefits in the economy kicking in in force in twenty twenty six.

All right, Look, the Working Family's Tax cut, the biggest element of it was extending and making permanent the Trump tax cuts.

If we had not done that in two weeks on January first, there would have been a four trillion dollar tax increase that would have been crippling to the economy.

So making those tax cuts permanent is enormously important.

We also made them bigger, so we passed no taxes on tips.

That was my legislation.

By the way, people will start seeing the benefits of that next year.

So if you're a waiter, if you're a waitress, if you're a bartender, if you work in a nail salon, if you're a taxicab driver, that the millions of Americans who rely on tips are going to see real, meaningful tax relief.

We've also got no tax on overtime, millions of Americans who earn a significant portion of their income on overtime that's now tax free.

No tax on Social Security for the millions of seniors at home relying on Social Security.

All three of those are going to effect in twenty twenty six.

All three of those are going to provide really meaningful relief.

Speaker 3

What else do we have?

Speaker 4

You look at the investments that we have over one hundred billion dollars in secure in the border.

So Trump is enforcing the law that was critical that produced the immediate drop.

And now we provided the funding to build the wall, to put in technology, to hire border patrol, to hire ice, to invest in law enforcement.

All of that is designed to make these massive improvements stick.

That is, as a conservative, there's never been a one hundred billion dollar investment in securing the border.

Speaker 2

You know, it's interesting.

Speaker 1

I was speaking yesterday to a realator group.

They asked me to come and speak, and they said to me, they never could have imagined that securing the border would have such a positive impact as they've described it for American families.

They said they were witnessing over the last basically four and a half years, the age of first time home buyers had skyrocketed, where home ownership was unattainable for families, young families in their thirties.

It was now getting to be forty before people were getting the first.

Speaker 2

Time home buyer.

Rent had gotten out of control.

Speaker 1

And they said they can't wait for twenty twenty six because they are seeing now with two million plus deportations, people have stopped coming across the border illegally.

They believe it's going to be a great year for American families and first time home buyers because now you're not having to con pete with so many illegal immigrants.

Speaker 4

Well, and we covered that on Wednesday's pod, that the new data came out that showed rents dropped significantly, and they dropped significantly because the President has deported two million people who are here illegally.

Those people are now not buying homes, they're not running apartments and supply and demand.

That means that it drives down the cost of a home.

It drives down the cost of rent for Americans.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it really does.

It's incredible.

And that's just one of those massive victories.

And it's not just that, it's also the national security part of this.

Speaker 2

I mean, really, do you hear.

Speaker 1

Home prices and national security really to one simple issue that's something that you had been fighting so hard on to another victory.

Speaker 4

Well, and in the Working Families tax cut, we invested one hundred and fifty billion dollars in rebuilding the military so we can stand up to our adversaries, so we can stand up to China and the other enemies.

Speaker 3

We have across the globe.

Speaker 4

And the way it works in the Senate is when you're drafting that bill.

Each committee chairman drafts whatever is in their jurisdiction.

So I am the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

That committee covers about forty percent of the US economy.

What that means is that everything within that jurisdiction I wrote.

Speaker 3

I had the lead pen and wrote.

Speaker 4

So, for example, one thing that is in the Commerce jurisdiction is the Coastguard.

So we invested twenty four and a half billion dollars in.

Speaker 3

The Coast Guard.

Speaker 4

Now, to give you a sense of how important that is, how significant that is.

What what do you think the annual budget of the Coastguard is?

Speaker 2

I honestly have no clue.

Speaker 4

It's between eleven and twelve billion.

Okay, So we invested more than two hundred percent the annual budget of the Coast Guard into the Coast Guard.

Speaker 3

I mean, I mean it is.

Speaker 1

Store were purposely and deliberately underfunded by the Left and the Biden administration because they didn't want them to be able to do this job.

Speaker 4

Well, look, it was what we were investing.

And let me tell you what we invested.

It was specifically in capital, so rebuilding infrastructure, building new ships, building new helicopters, and a massive portion of it is polar ice cutters.

Speaker 3

So polar ice cutters in the Arctic.

Speaker 4

We're getting our asses kicked by China and by Russia, and we don't have the capability right now.

Speaker 3

To build Arctic ice cutters.

Speaker 4

Well, we've invested billions in building new ice cutters.

And the beauty of it is that's bringing shipbuilding back to the United States.

One company, Davies, announced a billion and a half dollars investment in a shipyard in Galveston, Texas to build those ships.

Let us compete with China, but also bringing manufacturing capacity back to the United States.

Speaker 2

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There was so much a focus on the economy and this last year and the wins, but there were some really big wins within that.

One of them deals with the airwaves, and it deals with national security, It deals with people and what you can have access to explain this big win because it didn't get as much media attention as it probably should have.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 4

Look, as you know, my number one priority is jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.

There are lots of major wins this year that we passed into law that are impacting job creation, that are creating more high paying jobs in Texas and all across the country.

One of the big ones is spectrum.

Now, what is spectrum?

Electromagnetic spectrum is how everything communicates, how how our cell phones work, how Wi Fi works, how TV and broadcasts and everything goes out over spectrum.

The largest holder of spectrum in the United States is the United States government.

The United States government has massive quantities of spectrum that it owns that are not available to the private sector.

I wrote into the Working Families Tax cut a mandate that the federal government auction off eight hundred megahertz a spectrum to the private sector.

Now, now what does that mean.

That means that in the coming years that is going to generate over one hundred billion dollars for the US government.

I mean, the spectrum is incredibly valuable.

That's real money that goes directly to the US Treasury.

Now, why will it generate over one hundred billion dollars?

Because that spectrum is incredibly valuable.

Number one, it's it's it's valuable for our phones.

It's valuable to beat China in the race for five G and then beat China and the race for six G.

And you've got to have the spectrum to invest in that.

What that means is you're gonna see You're gonna see the big phone companies.

You're gonna see AT and T and Verizon and Sprint investing tens of billions of dollars into new capacity to use that spectrum.

All of that means more jobs.

That means more people setting up towers, more people building that innovation, and also it supercharges the tech world, much of the AI world.

Winning the race for AI having that spectrum available means the private sector they can compete for all sorts of different uses for using that spectrum.

And I'll tell you that was not an easy battle, because most of that spectrum that the government holds is either the Department of War or the intelligence agencies have them and they don't like to give them up.

We won that fight.

That will generate thousands and thousands of that will produce thousands and thousands of new jobs.

Another big win in the Working Family tax cut is air traffic control modernization.

Speaker 1

In that bill we certainly needed, by the way, like I as I think people understand how desperately the need was for modernization.

What the Trump administration inherited.

You and I both remember the very first night a dear friend of ours became the cabinet member in charge of Transportation, Secretary John Duffy.

The first night he and his family went into his building where his office was going to be and we had that horrific crash with a helicopter that came across and hit that plane at Reagan National wife was in the air that night, and it brought up even a bigger issue like how does this happen?

And we realized there was a massive modernization that was desperately needed for the safety as more and more planes are flying each and every day.

You fly every week, I fly almost every week as well.

I want to know I'm safe.

I want to know when my family's on a plane that they are safe.

And this is something that's good for every American that flies well.

Speaker 4

And we had two major victories this year in the Senate on aviation safety.

The first was in the Working Family Tax Cut.

We invested twelve and a half billion dollars in terms of modernizing our air traffic control.

Air traffic controllers right now in the tower.

If you look at the technology they've been using, it is literally nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties technology.

They're using radar, they're using little slips of paper, they're using floppy disc.

They have computers with floppy disc.

When I talk to anyone under thirty, they don't know what a floppy disk is but saying that's the technology that they're using.

So there's twelve and a half million dollars.

They've been the FAA, the Trump administration has been ripping up copper wiring that was failing and replacing it with fiber.

They'd been getting new and updated computers, getting new technology, all designed so the air traffic controllers can know where the planes are and can manage the airspace to avoid collisions.

You know, you mentioned the horrific accident that happened over d C.

Ronald Reagan Airport at the end of January.

That accident, an American Airlines flight was flying from Wichita, Kansas, landing at d C.

Reagan and as you know, it hit an Army black Hawk helicopter.

Sixty seven lives perished that instant.

As you noted, Heidi was literally in the air scheduled to land at Reagan.

About an hour after that, I was sitting at dinner.

I was having dinner with Mike Waltz, who was at the time President Trump's National security advisor.

Now he's the Ambassador of the UN in Mike's a good friend of mine, and we were at dinner when we both got notified.

In fact, my body man who you know, he came up and thankfully he did this right.

He started with Heidi's okay, but I need to tell you what just happened, and that was a good way to start.

I'm glad the Heighti's okay started.

But if you look at aviation safety, a second big victory that we just had on aviation safety happened this week, which is in response to what happened there, I began drafting legislation that's called the Road Or Act, and the Road To Act is designed to mandate that all aircraft in the sky use what's called ADSB technology ADSB out and ADSB in, and that is advanced technology to help the other planes in the sky and the other aircraft see each other and to help the air traffic controllers have the information on the precise location in real time.

With radar, there's a delay, whereas ADSB gives it to you in real time.

Now, why is that directly relevant to the crash.

Well, the Army Blackhawk helicopter had ADSB technology installed.

Speaker 3

They had it turned off.

Speaker 4

Yeah, and so the American Airlines pilot couldn't see the Blackhawk helicopter and didn't know it was there until the two collided it, and unfortunately, we discovered the Army had a policy of leaving ADSB turned off just as a routine matter.

It was indefensible.

And so the Rotor Act mandates number one, that the military followed the same rules as everybody else.

If you're going to be flying, particularly through crowded airspace at an airport, use the technology so the other aircraft can see where you are and so you don't have a collision.

And it mandates that everyone use ADSB technology in and out in the planes.

That legislation.

You know, it's interesting.

We had the Senate just passed this week the National Defense Authorization Act that we passed that air every year, that is the big military authorization that we pass and someone in the House of Representatives dropped a provision in in the dark of night that would have allowed the Army to keep ADSB turned off.

Well, this week I passed the Road To Act and repealed that provision.

And so when the House passes it and the President's signs it, which I think will happen in January, everyone will be safe for flying.

Speaker 1

There is one thing that I actually think will end up being your legacy one day, long, long down the road, when you're long and gone and people say, what did Ted Cruz do?

I actually believe this will be brought up for an extremely long amount of time.

It is going to be transformative to this country, to the young people in this country, and it deals with education.

It is something you've been championing for decades, an idea that you love, and now it became reality and you had to fight tooth and nail to keep it in the big bill.

Talk about this victory and what it means application wise, especially moving forward.

Speaker 4

Well, look, I agree with you in terms of the magnitude of this victory.

And let me say, when we were in the middle of drafting the Working Families Tax Cut in April of this year, we did a retreat of all the Senate Republicans and we were talking about all the different elements that we wanted the bill, and everyone had different priorities, and I stood up kind of midway through and I said said, look, there are a lot of things in this bill that are incredibly important.

Cutting taxes, investing and securing the border, rebuilding the military.

All of that matters a ton.

But I said, we had to think for a minute about legacy, about what will be remembered ten twenty thirty years from now, what will be remembered when we're dead and buried.

And I said, I've got two suggestions, two suggestions that fall into the category.

The first was school choice and the second was what has now become the Trump accounts.

Now, both of those suggestions I wrote the legislation for, and both of them are in the bill.

Let's start with school choice.

What is in the bill.

This will kick in.

This will start kicking in in a year.

And what it will do is every taxpayer in America can give up to seventeen hundred dollars to a scholarship granting organization in the States.

If you do so, you will get a dollar for dollar tax credit.

Now, importantly, this is not a deduction, it's a credit.

What does that mean.

It means if Ben Ferguson writes a check for one thousand, seven hundred dollars to an organization that gives scholarships to kids in Texas, you owe oney seven hundred dollars less to Uncle Sam.

You just give less on your taxes.

So it's basically free money.

From your perspective, what that is going to do is it is going to produce tens of billions of dollars of scholarships for kids in K through twelve education all across the country and ten twenty thirty years from now, literally millions of kids who were stuck fuck in failing schools, many of them African American kids, Hispanic kids, low income kids, who are in schools where there's violence, where they're not learning, where they're not able to get the education.

You're failing and we're failing them.

Look, you know, if it's a five year old, it's not the five year old's fault.

If the kindergarten is a crappy kindergarten, that's not the kid's fault.

That is, at the end of the day, school choice is about.

I think it's the civil rights issue of the twenty first century.

I think every child deserves access to an excellent education, and it shouldn't matter what your race is, what your wealth is, where you live.

This provision thirty years from now, we're going to look back and literally there're gonna be millions of kids who would have been failed by the system, but instead got a scholarship and ended up being able to go to a Catholic school to a Jewish day school, to a private school, and to be safe, not to be at risk of violence, to learn, to read and learn.

And if you get education, it opens up every other opportunity for the rest of your life.

And if you don't get an education, you're screwed.

And so that is in there.

Look, I've been fighting for school choice for thirty years.

The school choice movement is the domestic priority I care the most about.

Speaker 2

By the way, let's go back from here.

That maybe miss that episode.

Speaker 1

I don't think people understand just how hard democrats, the teachers' unions didn't want this to happen, and how hard you had to fight to keep it in there, because there was many times where we thought it may not make it.

Speaker 4

Look And it was particularly difficult because the Senate Parliamentarian.

To get anything through the reconciliation process, you have to go through the Senate Parliamentarian, and there are Kane rules for what is allowed and what is not allowed when you're doing reconciliation.

Three times the Senate Parliamentarian struck this school choice provision, and normally the way that happens, it's like litigation where you have both sides the Democrats get to argue.

So the Democrats argued to the parliamentarian, stripped this out and fought tooth and nail.

Now, normally it is staff.

It is staff of senators who go in and argue on both sides.

It is very unusual for a senator to do this.

I did this myself.

I went in and argued to the Parliamentarian and her team directly, and we ended up rewriting the provision.

We rewrote it three times to get it through.

When she objected to something, we rewrote it to address that, and we got it in the second provision that is going to have just just generational.

Speaker 3

Impacts or the Trump accounts, and.

Speaker 1

Starting that I love there called drum accounts.

There is a great marketing measure.

But this started with you, senator, and you could easily call this the cruise accounts the same time.

Speaker 4

Yeah, but he's in sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue and so he gets to have his name on it.

And that's great.

He signed it in the law and it is historic.

But I did write the provision and I got to say the impact, what's going to happen next year?

Speaker 3

Next year?

On July fourth, every child in.

Speaker 4

America is going to have a personal investment account open for them.

Newborn children will have one thousand dollars automatically seeded into it.

Speaker 2

This is amazing.

Speaker 4

Parents, families, employers can put up to five thousand dollars a year in a tax advantage account and all of that will be invested in the S and P five hundred, will be invested in a broad based equity index, invested in.

Speaker 3

The stock market.

Speaker 4

Two massive benefits from this Number One, every child in America will get the benefit of compound growth, and that is incredibly powerful.

A little girl born next year, she has one thousand dollars put in it automatically.

If her parents or family or an employer puts five thousand a year, that's invested in the stock market.

We grow at the historical rate of average seven percent of the S and P five hundred.

By the time she is eighteen, she will have one hundred and seventy thousand dollars in that account.

And if she keeps investing five thousand a year, by the time she's thirty five, she will have seven hundred thousand dollars in that account.

That's transformation.

And we're not talking rich kids.

We're talking the kids of a single mom, talking everybody.

Speaker 3

We're talking everybody.

Speaker 4

That's money that she can use to buy a home, to start a business, to get an education.

I mean, that changes her entire life.

But secondly, and this is the part as a conservative that I'm really excited about.

We are creating a whole new generation of capitalists, a whole new generation of kids.

Every kid is going to be an owner of the biggest employers in America.

And so they won't think about companies as big, mean, scary corporations.

They'll look at their phone and they'll see the app and say, look, I own I own one hundred bucks of Apple, or or or Boeing or McDonald's.

And that I think will change the country.

And and without exaggeration, Ben, I think those two provisions are the most consequential provisions of the entire bill.

And you know, it was interesting, as you know, a couple of weeks ago, I was I was at the White House with the President for a big press conference on the Trump accounts, and and Michael and Susan Dela were there, and the two of them are giving six and a quarter billion dollars to put to put money in the accounts of millions of kids all over the country, and we deliberately wrote this so that philanthropists could do that.

That was part of the design.

I wrote the legislation so these accounts would be able to accept gifts of philanthropy.

And and it was interesting at the press conference where where we were talking about the effect and transformational effect, and you could actually see President Trump.

I think he he really got the impact of this at the press conference in a way I don't think he ever had.

And there was a reporter who asked him, said, mister President, are these Trump Accounts going to be a major part of your legacy?

And you could kind of see him thinking about that and then just like, yes, yes they will.

And I think that's absolutely right.

Look, I mean, in terms of my tenure in the Senate, there is nothing I am more proud of doing in the Senate in thirteen years fighting for Texans than passing the biggest school choice program in American history and passing the Trump Accounts into law.

And both of those they're going to impact not just you're in my kids, but our grandkids and their grandkids.

Those are victories of an historic level.

And that's why I say we keep We've won victories we've never seen at this level.

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As we're doing our year review, I love getting to say this one.

Speaker 2

We had a big win on the issue of space.

Speaker 1

We're not talking about you finding aliens or anything, but we do have an update on space that's near ended of your heart.

With NASA in Houston, of course, talk about the big victory there.

Speaker 4

Well, in the Working Families Tax cut, we invested ten billion dollars in NASA and commercial space, and in particular in going back to the Moon.

And again because that falls within the jurisdiction of the Commerce Committee, I wrote this provision.

And we are in a race to go back to the Moon.

We're in a race with China.

China has said publicly they are going to go to the Moon by twenty thirty and they're trying to.

Speaker 3

Get back there.

Speaker 4

And it's also a race not just to get there, but to also to build sustained human habitation on the surface of the Moon, to begin mining on the surface of the Moon.

That's the next challenge that we're moving towards.

China is moving full speed ahead, and we did major investments to say America is going to beat China back to the Moon.

We are going to have sustained human habitation on the lunar surface or in CIST lunar orbit.

And that investment, it is in the bill.

It is critically important and the objective for us to land on the Moon by twenty twenty eight, two years before China.

With President Trump still in the Oval Office, and that investment will make it.

And I'll tell you this is a point I made if we lose.

Speaker 3

If we were to.

Speaker 4

Lose the race to the Moon, I think the impact of seeing the Chinese on the Moon before we could get there, I think it would be a bigger blow to the country than Sputnik was.

Sputnik when the Russians launched the first satellite, Sputnik around the Earth, it was a massive blow.

It started the space race, and I think losing the Moon to China would be orders of magnitude worse.

That investment is in there.

It matters, and it matters also enormously.

They're over fifty thousand high paying jobs in Texas that are directly connected to space, so it's big for jobs, jobs in the economy.

Speaker 1

Way selfishly, I just think it would be so cool for kids' minds to be blown to see NHD people talking on the Moon.

Just the wonder and the and the inspiration that would come from that for an entire generation, you know, with everything that's yesh and technology driven, like just to have a moment of pause where we're like, we went to the Moon and you can see an HD.

I can't imagine what that does for kids that are dreamers, for their futures and their education as well.

Speaker 4

Look, I spend a lot of time at at at Johnson Space Center.

I spent a lot of time with NASA, and like the inspiration that astronauts provide.

Now do you know the connection that Rice University has to us going to the moon.

Speaker 3

The first time?

Speaker 4

No?

Speaker 2

I do not.

Speaker 4

So it was at Rice University at the at the Rice Stadium.

You've been to that that football stadium?

Uh, that that JFK gave the speech where he committed we will go to the moon within a decade.

Speaker 3

And and and in fact what he said, he said, Uh, why.

Speaker 4

Does Rice play the University of Texas.

They do so not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

And that was that was his explanation for why are we going to the moon.

We're going to the moon for the same reason Rice plays ut not because it easy, because it's it's hard and it inspires millions of kids.

We're going to do that again.

But it's also critical.

Listen there there there are major economic benefits.

I've predicted for a long time the first trillionaire is going to be made in space.

That may well, be elon Musk, He's already halfway there.

Speaker 3

I think.

I think the.

Speaker 4

Mining that we're going to see on the Moon and ultimately on Mars is going to generate enormous economic activity.

And it also matters from national security and and and and from a military perspective.

Controlling what is quite literally the high ground is really important for keeping America safe.

Speaker 1

Cafe standards.

I want to make sure we get this in there before the end of the show.

Let's talk about that victory as well.

Speaker 4

Another provision I wrote in the bill, we zeroed out cafe standards.

Now, what are the cafe standards?

Speaker 3

There?

Speaker 4

The rules bid the administration put in place to drive up the cost of your car and drive up the cost of your truck.

And what they did is they jacked up the mileage it had to get to what were unsustainable levels.

And they were doing that because they wanted to ban the internal combustion engine.

They wanted to make it impossible for you to buy a gasoline car.

They wanted to force you to buy an electric vehicle.

Speaker 1

Now, Alouise, let's be clear, it also put you and your family at risk.

Yeah, because of having to be forced to make the cars lighter.

They had to get rid of the steel in cars that made them so safe, like tanks.

And that's the reason why everything's now in plastic and the bumpers and you've had a small wreck, you see how things just shatter, it's because they're trying to meet those standards.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 4

Look, my first car was a nineteen seventy eight Ford Fairmont.

It was my grandfather's car that he gave it to me.

Speaker 3

It was we called it the green Bomb.

Speaker 2

When you were younger, I knew it.

That was confirmation, right, are you kidding?

Speaker 4

That was the coolest car.

We called it the green Bomb, and it was a tank.

And if you got a sixteen year old old boy, all sixteen year old boys are idiots.

And for the teenagers listening, I apologize, but I was there.

I was an idiot, And I promise you when you get older, you understand it's just.

Speaker 3

Part of life growing up.

Speaker 4

And like putting your kids in a car that is big enough that if they hit something like an idiot, that they're not going to be badly hurt or killed, that matters.

Speaker 3

We zeroed it out.

Speaker 4

The effect of that is going to be to lower the cost of you getting a car or a truck lowered it by thousands of dollars.

That's another victory that is in the bill.

And it also is going to save life, just as you said, because you'll be able to make cars that are safer with more steel and less plastic.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it really is incredible.

Speaker 1

Finally, one last thing I do want to hit, and it's important one to end the show.

Speaker 2

Take It Down Act.

Speaker 1

Something that you worked so hard on became reality as well this year and it keeps kids safe.

Speaker 3

Yeah, it's a great victory.

Speaker 4

Look that there is a growing problem with what what's called non consensual intimate imagery, and we're talking both real world so called revenge porn where you have boyfriend or girlfriend, they have an intimate relationship, they take explicit pictures or videos of each other, and then they have a breakup and they get one of them is ticked off and decides, all right, I'm gonna stick it to you and I'm going to release this to the world.

And it is a grotesque violation of privacy.

Nobody has a right to do that to somebody else.

There is secondly, a more recent aspect of that, which is deep fakes, and people are using AI to create deep fakes where they take pictures of real people and they use AI to make it appear that they're naked or inexplicit and sexual situations.

More than ninety five percent of the victims of this are women or teenage girls.

And so I drafted a bill that's called the Take It Down Act.

That number one makes it a crime, makes it a felony to post non consensual intimate imagery, either real pictures or fake pictures.

And secondly, it gives you the right, if God forbid, you're the victim of this, any tech platform that is displaying that content, you have a federal statutory right to demand they take it down, and they have to take it down immediately.

And we passed that through the Senate.

We passed that through the House.

The First Lady, Milania Trump, was a big champion.

She joined with me, and I was in the Rose Garden right next to the President and right next to the First Lady when he signed that legislation.

Protecting kids, protecting teenage girls, teenage boys, women, protecting everyone, and also standing up to the abuse of AI creating deep fakes and victimizing people.

Speaker 2

It's so important.

Speaker 1

If you've ever known and I know a family lost to a child because this.

They took their own life because of the shame and they were being bullied.

It was online and it was actually not even them.

It was a fake picture, but everyone thought it was this person.

After you meet with those families, you've done it.

You have a heart for them.

This is going to save lives as well.

I want to say it again, do not forget Download Verdict with Ted Cruz wherever you get your podcasts with this show Monday, Wednesday Friday.

We also do as a video pod.

You can watch it on YouTube or Facebook as well, and the senday and I will be back with you more on this.

I can promise you a big wins ahead in the new year as well, so make sure you don't miss a single episode.

And if you're listening on the radio right now, thank you so much for listening as well.

We'll see you back again real soon.

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