US House of Representative Matt Rosendale visits with KMON morning show.

US House of Representative Matt Rosendale visited with the 560 KMON morning show hosts Pat & Randy today.  Here is the transcript for the interview:

Pat: Pat and Randy here on the morning show. We're pleased to be joined by the congressman of our great state of Montana, Congressman Matt Rosendale. How are you, sir?

Rosendale: What a day. It's cooling down. It feels good out there.

Pat: Do you know tomorrow it's going to be 100 again? 100 degrees?

Rosendale: I think that's just like a one day event, because I think the rest of the week it's going to pull back down again.

Pat: Friday, 58.

Rosendale: Yeah, that's what I like.

Pat: Hey, real quick, before we get to what happened over at the airport yesterday, do you go back in session this week or when is it?

Rosendale: Next week. I'm here all week, and I'm going to travel around the western side of the state. I'm going to hit Kalispell, Sanders County. I'm going to make a stop down in Missouri and take care of some things. So I'm going to hit the western side, and then the end of this week, I wrap up and they'll take us back for two more weeks. Nancy's got some more money to spend, I guess.

Pat: I got a story on Nancy. There are rumors flying in DC that if they lose control of the House, the Democrats, she wants an ambassadorship, and she will leave the House of Congress. That's the report today.

Rosendale: Okay, that makes sense, because I'll tell you something. She announced months ago that she was not going to run for reelection, and that settled for, like, 30 days. And then she popped back out and said, oh, no, I am running for reelection. And I think that it hurt the fundraising efforts for the Democratic machine with her driving so bad that they said, you have got to keep your name on there. So that deal, honestly, if it was struck, which I would not be surprised, was actually made a long time ago, and now it's just starting to surface. Sort of sounds familiar. Like Mr. Baucus after he carried Obamacare and went to China.

Pat: This is why we like having him on, he's never short of saying what

Rosendale: look, you can't deny logic. You can ignore it, but you can't deny

Randy: it's what happened. It's what happened. So, hey, you had an opportunity to spend some time up at Montana Air National Guard yesterday. Tell me about that.

Rosendale: I'll tell you something that is really a thrill. The families gather up to greet their troops as they return home from active duty. And I've been there when they are shipping out and are deployed and when they're coming back. So the four C 130s, they come in, they buzz the hanger and just shakes the place, right? And everybody gets them so excited. It's like going up to the air show, okay, you can't go to that airshow without getting excited. And if you do, you must be sedated or something. I don't know. But then they all fly in formation right over the hanger. They get in line, and then they start coming into land. And they do not have to have the distance between those aircraft that commercial airlines do. So one is hitting the ground and they get about half a mile up the runway and the next one's coming down. So they land and then they stage up at the end of the runway. And I was like, what the heck are they doing there? And I was like, okay, so they're going to taxi in altogether, but there's a little hatch in front of the cabin where the captain sits, right? Sort of like where there would be a gunners turret. And it opens up. And every one of them posted a man in there with an American flag. If that doesn't stir you guys again, I just don't know what it will take. So each one of those had that turret opened up and a man standing there with a flag, and they parade into the crowd with the flags flying, and the troops climb off and they greet their families. It's really neat. I was glad to be there to greet them.

Pat: And they returned from Africa.

Rosendale: Yes, they came back in from Africa.

Randy: We've beat this horse to death, but we're going to beat it a little more today, and that's the Grizzly Bear. We have them in the town of Choteau right now. We have people afraid for their lives, and this is not the first time. Augusta, Conrad, in Simms Valley, in some of these towns. It's to the point that if Deb Holland is not going to do something about it, what can be done? What can Congress do?

Rosendale: I scream every time we have a natural resource hearing, okay? I am screaming about this, Randy. I mean, I am, because I know how serious it is. We have far exceeded the target populations. You can ignore logic. You can't deny it. Same as I say about a lot of these things. And it is a big problem. And this administration is fighting us. They're trying to put more restrictive guidelines out on the bear, on the wolves, on the sage grouse, and it is problematic. Not only does it cause danger for my constituents in the population, but it puts a whole other layer of control over the property rights of individuals. We are continuing, and I've got a really good block of my colleagues that understand this and that have signed on the letters to try to apply this additional pressure. But elections have consequences. And until we start changing some of the people that are serving us in public office right now, these are the kinds of things that we're going to have to deal with.

Randy: So November is our first opportunity as people on the ground to make an impact on this problem.

Rosendale: Exactly. So this November. We will win the house back. I don't know by what margin, but we will win the house back. And then what we have to have is the intestinal fortitude to make sure that we tie extremely important issues like this to our budgeting process, because the house representatives, even if that's all we have, even if we don't have the senate, we're clearly not going to have the White House. What we have is control over the budget. The house of representatives is charged with developing a budget and appropriating those funds. And so any issue like this that we can tie funding to, and it may tie funding to something else to make sure that we calls action on delisting the grizzly bear on securing our southern border so that we don't have fentanyl streaming into the country and killing our children. Anything that we can do to tie that funding to any one of these issues, we should be doing it. And that's what I have talked to my leadership about to make sure that we're ready to take on that fight.

Pat: Matt Rosendale, congressman from the great state of Montana, joining us. I'm Pat Frisch, Randy Bogden here as well. Have you seen what they're doing with the fentanyl now? They're now making it into colors, looks like sweethearts and that's dangerous, man, with kids and stuff around.

Rosendale: Devious. It's devious. So I spent two days on the southern border last week with my good friend Andy Biggs. He's a representative from Arizona. It's the third time that I've gone down. I hadn't been down for about a year, so I wanted to see how things have changed. It has devolved. I mean, it really has gotten worse. It's gotten much worse. We met with border patrol. We met with local law enforcement. We went met and with local ranchers. The ranchers down there are finding, I heard, anywhere from 14 dead bodies to up to 40 dead bodies on their property. Guys, I cannot even begin to comprehend this. 280,000 encounters, okay? Last month alone, of those 280,000 encounters, 89% were released into our country. They were processed and said show up and released into our country. Until they show up into our courts and determine their asylum status, 11% are being shipped back. Colombia actually has signed an agreement to make sure that any Colombians that we detect are shipped back. So good. Their labor problems are so bad, they don't have anybody there working. They have to start sending them back, I guess. They don't have Walmart greeters. They don't have people working, so they're shipping them back. I went to the border. They've got such a system set up now the cartels will, by the people that they're charging, part of their package deal. It's like a travel agency. They pay for a round trip flight tickets wherever they're coming from, wherever. When they bring them into Mexico, they issue them a tourist visa. And this is a hard plastic. Looks like a driver's license. Yeah. And if they issue that and they've got their return ticket, so they're allowed to go anywhere in Mexico that they want to. When they hit the United States border and they turn themselves in, we picked up stacks of these tourist visas from every country you can imagine. I mean Nicaragua, China, Czech Republic and India. These people are coming from all over the world. The representatives. There was about a half a dozen of us that were down there. We would use them like trading cards, and I took several. I've got Nicaragua. I've got Cuba.

Pat: What are you going to do with them?

Rosendale: Show them off and show up to people how bad it has gotten down there? There was three people being detained right when I got there. They were from Russia. CBP in the Yuma sector had already checked in by 10:30 that morning. 630 individuals that were coming across the border. And what I found out every trip, you find a little something different out. It's not all the same. So you see on the evening news, Eagle Pass, where there's thousands and thousands and thousands of people just voluntarily turning themselves in. And that's sort of like the Tucson sector as well. But when you get to Yuma, they're not all just turning themselves in. And they have videotape of monitoring where they're showing dozens and dozens of people at night coming through. Fully camouflaged gilly suits, head mask. I mean, head, nets. And carpet shoes so that you can't track their footprints. If it's that easy to get into our country over here in Tucson, why are you sneaking through over there in Yuma? They are the bad people, and there's 27,000 of them that have gotten through that they know of just last month alone of the really bad criminal element that we don't know who they are, we don't know where they're from. They're not dropping IDs at the border. Okay. And this is where all this fentanyl is coming in. We had a press conference with the Governor and Senator Daines and myself and Bozeman two weeks ago. It's killing our people. We have to secure the southern border.

Pat: Yes. Congressman, always great to see you. Enjoy your travels around the state and then back to work for a couple of weeks and then a reelection bid underway. It's good to be back with everybody. It's always great to see you. Congressman Matt Rosendale. Thank you very much.