Anthony Sabatini-Republican Candidate for Congress

This is a podcast episode of the Open Forum in the Villages Florida, featuring an interview with Anthony Sabatini, who is running for District 11 in the United States Congress. Sabatini discusses his background as an attorney, his experience in the Florida legislature, and his role as chairman of the Lake County Republican Party. He outlines his platform, which includes a strong conservative agenda, support for building a border wall, protecting the lives of the unborn, defending religious liberty and Second Amendment rights, and fighting against government corruption. Sabatini also emphasizes the need for term limits for elected officials and Supreme Court justices. He criticizes the current government's handling of immigration and proposes solutions such as deporting illegal immigrants and defunding certain government agencies. Welcome to the Open Forum in the Villages Florida podcast. In this show we talk to leaders in the community, leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live here in the villages to get perspectives of what is happening here in the villages. We hope to add a new episode most Fridays at 9 a.m. We are a listener-supported podcast. You can become a supporter for as little as $3 per month or you can choose to pay more. To become a supporter, go to OpenForumInTheVillages.com and click on support in the black box. There will be shout outs for supporters in episodes. This is Mike Roth here on Open Forum in the Villages Florida. Here today with Anthony Sabatini. Anthony is running looking primary against Daniel Webster. Thanks for joining me, Anthony. Hey, thanks for having me on. And I think why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about your background. Sure. I'm an attorney from Lake County. I grew up here in Central Florida, lived here pretty much my whole life, moved down when I was just a kid, went to public school, University of Florida for college and law, came out and practiced law in my offices in Mount Dora. I just finished up my time in the Florida legislature. I did four years in the state house where I was ranked every year the most conservative member of the Republican caucus, which I'm very proud of, having a strong conservative record. And then I was a city commissioner in the town of Eustis for two years and got a lot done there. I also serve as a captain in the Florida Army National Guard Infantry, still serving on its over eight hurricanes now throughout the years. And I also serve as the chairman of the Lake County Republican Party. So I'm the current chairman of that. I'm running for District 11 for the United States Congress and in the Republican primary. My wife, Francesca, is an attorney, works at my law firm also, and we have one eight month old child named Raquel. What type of law do you practice? General civil litigation. So a lot of contract law, property law, employment law, and a little bit of criminal defense to keep it interesting. You were in the Army for a number of years? Still in. Florida Army National Guard, going on 14 years and it's been a blast, absolutely loving it, continue to serve. Probably will do my 20 years and then... How long have you been chairman of the Lake County Republican Party? 11 months. I got elected last December for a two year term. So I'll continue in that role through next December and hopefully after the election, once we win in November and swear in January, I'll pass that off to one of the other good conservatives in our organization to continue leading it. From a platform perspective, what are the main points of your candidacy? Well, I think the biggest is just doing a very strong conservative America first agenda. A lot of what Donald Trump talks about is exactly what I believe needs to be done. We need to build a wall. We need to deport illegal immigrants. We need to cut taxes and help business and bring back jobs, fix this economy that Joe Biden's slung down so much. He's created so much economic uncertainty. So that's a major, major issue for us. Pro-life, I want to make sure we're protecting the lives of the unborn, protecting religious liberty, freedoms of every American, including their second amendment rights, and really just make America great again. It's a combination of reviving the economy that Biden's tried to destroy, rebuilding our military, and fighting back against the corruption in government, especially this new wokeness, far leftism you're seeing in the government, and also this weaponized Department of Justice. Those are the key things I'm running on. Right. So how do you fix the government with so many of these weak supporters in protected positions? Well, the biggest thing we need to be doing is cutting government. That's the quickest, easiest, and smartest way to fix it is to just eliminate it. For example, the Department of Education shouldn't exist. Truth is, we should have gotten rid of it in 2017. We had the Republicans in the House, the Senate, the White House, but you had deep staters and leftists in the Republican Party, like Paul Ryan, who were fighting that. But we should be shutting down some of the government agencies straight up. Another mechanism that the Republicans thus far have failed to do but needs to get done is you need to tie the budget to policy. So we'll fund a certain agency or a job title as long as it doesn't do X, Y, or Z, or it does do X, Y, and Z. With that stipulation, you can defund things just through riders into the budget. So for example, right now the Department of Justice, it's not that we don't want a Department of Justice. Obviously, you're going to want one. Sure. We want an effective one. We all do. But you also don't want radical political actors who are misprioritizing government money and focus acting within it, and so you can block certain actions of Department of Justice executive branch employees just by amending the budget in a certain way. Now, while I agree with the fact that we should have a southern border wall, there is something called an airplane. How do you protect us against that with a budget wall? You mean people flying into the country? That is correct. Well, that's a customs position. So you need to make sure that you're reforming ICE and US Customs and Border Patrol to effectively stop. The truth of the matter is there's far, far, far less people coming in through flights over staying visas than there is just straight up walking into the country or boating into the country. We've had 50 or 100 Venezuelans land in South Florida this week. So far, the response from Biden has been nothing, he doesn't really care. And so that's something that needs to get fixed rather quickly. But just putting a focus on that, reforming those agencies, we talked about defunding agencies from doing certain things. One of the things that Border Patrol does now is once they detain somebody at the border, they'll fly them in further. To your point, flying them is an issue, but the truth is they come in physically through the border and then they're flown in further. They're using our money to fly them in further into the country and then giving them cell phones, housing, different types of payments. You can block that through the budget. Republicans have failed to do that. It's one of the biggest mistakes McCarthy made. It's why Ken McCarthy had to go. He should have never been the speaker, but at a minimum, he should have been removed because he refused to use the budget in such a way to be constructive in stopping the invasion at the border. Well, now we have an invasion of cities like New York City with thousands and thousands of illegal aliens up in hotels. How do we get those people out of the country? You have to deport them. That's the truth of the matter. You have to amp up our Customs and Border Agency and ICE to remove these people, physically remove these people. There's no other way to do it. This is what we need to be pushing. And the truth is, knowing that Biden won't do it until he's gone, states need to step up in the meantime. You know, Texas just last week passed a law saying that they're going to arrest and detain and push out illegals who come into the state of Texas. Florida really should do exactly the same. Every state is a border state. If somebody comes into Florida illegally, they should be removed, especially if they're a criminal illegal alien. The truth is, we already have 800,000 illegal aliens in Florida right now. That's a problem. The place to start, though, is with all the criminal illegal aliens that are already in the criminal justice system. There are hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands. And so that's who needs to be targeted by the state in the meantime until we win the White House. Okay. Another thing I wanted to talk about was term limits. What's your position on term limits? So I'm... This is probably the biggest contrast between me and my opponent in this race. I'm extremely pro-term limit. I have probably the strongest position on term limits. I believe every elected official in the United States, from the president all the way down to city councils, should be term limited. So when I was in Tallahassee in the state legislature, every year I ran a bill, filed a bill to term limit somebody, whether it be school board members, county commissioners, et cetera. My opponent, of course, is a staunch opponent of term limits. He doesn't believe term limits should exist for anyone. When he was in the state legislature many years ago, he fought the term limit provision that passed in 1992. He continues to fight term limits for US Congress. He probably doesn't even believe the president should be term limited. I'm proud to be supported in this race by the United States. Term limits are the biggest term limit organization in the country. They're an opponent of Mr. Webster, who believes people should be career politicians. Of course, he served 44 continuous years in political office and hasn't had a real private sector job in decades. So that's the background explanation of why he doesn't believe in term limits. And what about term limits for the Supreme Court? I do believe that Supreme Court justices should also be term limited. You know, the founding fathers, of course, debated that. They came upon the conclusion that they wanted them insulated. And I think that you can term limit and insulate them. I think they should be insulated. I think they should be, you know, independent of the power of government, you know, so they could make independent decisions and think freely, but also be term limited, too. Yeah, that's why there's a 10 or 15-year limit. That would be reasonable. 20 years, someplace in there, we ought to be able to get younger judges on the Supreme Court. And what is your position that some people have taken about wanting to pack the court with more justices? Well, I think that's completely and totally insane. It's also wildly unpopular with the public, which is why the Democrats have backed away from it. You know, they sort of ratchet that up every time we put somebody good on the court, like a Gorsuch or whoever, and then they back away. So, so far, there's been no serious effort towards it, you know, and even the majority Democrats at this point are against it. But, you know, we on the right and the Republicans know it's totally insane. It would destroy the integrity of the court system and our justice system. And so we're staunchly opposed, and I am, too. Let's go over to a different topic, talk about election fraud. Do you think there was election fraud in the last election? 100%. Documented evidence, very clear, you know, varying states and different states, varying amounts in different states. Some states there was a little bit more, some a little bit less. And most people in the election system will tell you there's always fraud. The question is, how much fraud is there? Is there enough to turn an election? I do believe in Georgia, they stole the election. It was a 10,000 vote disparity out of millions and millions of votes. I think it's three or four million votes cast in each state. It came down to 10,000. There's already documented evidence that Fulton County, some of the urban counties, they never tracked the ballots. They have limited mail-in ballots. In fact, I went to Georgia one month after, two months after the presidential contest to work with the Republican National Lawyers Association, volunteering for the Senate runoffs. And I worked the phone room, all I got was phone calls from people saying, hey, I received two or three ballots in the mail, or there's ballots coming into my mailbox that are assigned to names of people who have never even lived in this home. And so they flooded mail-in ballots out to the public, knowing that it would yield X amount of votes back from certain areas that are more prone to vote Democrat. And so that was, that's one example of the sort of voter fraud you saw in 2020 election. Difficult to prove on the back end though. Very difficult unless you have a state legislature that's completely and totally committed to investigating it and holding open investigations. We saw that the only state in the country that took it seriously enough to do an audit was Arizona, and the audit failed miserably, which to be completely honest, I don't blame them. It's very, very difficult to do an audit when there's millions and millions of votes, and you have uncooperative local government officials who were essentially counter-suing them in the legislature the entirety of the time to inhibit an effective audit of the Maricopa County election. And so that's what happened there, but it's just very difficult. But we do know that there's, for me, significant evidence showing interference on at least two or three of the states, and there's no way we could stop that for the next election, is there? Well, unfortunately, at this point, it's up to the individual states. It's impossible for us as Floridians to stop voter fraud in Philadelphia. I mean, we can volunteer in private capacities as a chairman of Republican Party and as a lawyer involved with different organizations, I can go up there and help. But in terms of passing state laws to change and secure the elections, it's really up to the Pennsylvanians, which is sad, but we're really in a bad position that way. Election fraud, a topic that really bothers me, is the ballot harvesting that's happening in several states. Is there any way to put a spotlight on that to reduce that from happening again or for the next laws? Sure. Yeah, there's definitely the possibility of federal possible potential involvement in that area. Like, for example, just yesterday, Argentina chose a right-wing Republican. Yesterday was great, 45 million people voted, they got the entire thing done in one hour. One hour after the polls were closed, 45 million people, and no allegations of voter fraud. They could run a much more secure election in some countries. We run an absolutely terrible system because of what you just described, ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots. Those two items alone prolong the length and longevity of an election, which therefore increases necessarily the potential for third-party actors to get involved and commence fraud and to mess with voting. So by reducing ballot harvesting and mail-in voting, you're going to more secure any election. So federal government, I think, you know, looking at all these countries around the world that have a federal election system, they actually do hand counting too. Isn't that crazy? They do hand counting and they got all the votes counted in one day? Yeah, I think what they do is they limit the amount of elections that people are voting on. So, for example, we get a ballot and it's 40 different items, you get 30, 60 different things. Theirs is far more limited. So it could just be a presidential contest, something like that. So it's either A or B. Pretty much. It makes it much easier, quicker, faster. The system is much more efficient. France is the same way. France gets their election done on a Sunday, you know, once a cycle, one-day voting, and all the ballots are in within an hour. So would it be a good idea to eliminate all of this early voting? Voting places are open for two weeks before the election. It would greatly, greatly limit it. I mean, ideally, yeah, you would have one-day voting, but the truth is, I think the best first step is to begin limitation. I don't think 10 days is way too long. Maybe a few days is okay, you know, first, and then see how... The public reacts to that, and then hopefully bring it to one day. But one-day voting should be ultimately the standard. There's no reason not to. It was the one. It was. The first time I voted, I mean, you voted on election day before you didn't vote. And maybe if you were sick, disabled, infirmed, you could get a mail-in ballot that had to be there at the morning elections before the election day. Yeah, we, you know, even when I was younger, if we had to have an excuse, you had to have a valid reason to vote, absentee or mail, and then they got rid of no excuse, or excuse voting went to no excuse, and basically made it anybody can vote anytime they want for weeks and weeks going into an election. I think that's bad for the system because, like I said earlier, anytime you keep the election open longer, you're going to necessarily make it less secure. But it's when you allow mail-in ballots for people who live a mile from the voting precinct, it becomes more prone for those ballots to be harvested, basically, I put it that way. Yeah. It seems to me when you allow ballot harvesting, what we have now, someone could take those ballots to a location, open them up, duplicate ballots, modern copying machines, and substitute different ballots for the ones that were harvested. Yeah, the two trends are basically necessarily correlated, which is that you mail out a ballot for everybody. For example, like Washington State, universal ballots, millions of ballots go out, and then those lists of all the voters are given to ballot harvesters, and they go to each of those houses and knock on the door, it's perfectly legal, by the way, for them to knock on your door and say, I know that you received a ballot this week, we're interested in chatting with you about that ballot, and blah, blah, blah. They do it in Arizona, too, which is insane, the Republicans haven't closed that yet, but that's what they do. That really seems like a terrible way to run a fair election. Yes. Let's talk about the differences between you and your opponent, Daniel Webster. Webster's been in office, it seems, forever, frankly, I don't remember what committee he's on. I think he's done very little. Right. And what will you do for us here in Central Florida? Sure. Well, the biggest difference based on our policies, number one is reform of government. I believe in term limits, he's staunchly opposed to passing term limits. He believes there should be no term limits. You know, he served 44 years in office, I have not done nearly that, and I've never been a full-time politician. I've always been an attorney or worked in some capacity, I've never been a full-time government guy. You know, he's collected $3.5 million from government over the last 44 years, $3.5 million. I have not. And so, I don't plan to be in Congress very long, because I believe in term limits. That's what I'm going to be there fighting for. Other major policy decisions are the funding of a corrupt government, you know, he's voted for the debt ceiling, he's voted for Biden's budget, he's voted for a lot of the worst parts of this government that's operating, essentially, terror in our country and against American families. I would be a member of the Freedom Caucus, which means I'd be voting for less government, less taxes, less spending on day one. He's never been a member of the Freedom Caucus, he's not a real conservative, he's considered one of the more moderate or liberal Republican in the legislature, in the Congress, that is. And so, we would be completely opposed on that issue, too. You know, the truth of the matter is, the energy that a congressman would display were very different. I've always been somebody that did the maximum amount they could in the state legislature, filed the most amount of bills, fought the biggest fights, especially when it came to the COVID tyranny. Webster is somebody who sits in the back benches, doesn't really do much, doesn't say much, you know, and essentially doesn't really get a lot done. He's on some very insignificant committees, he's not a leader on any issue, he's, in fact, he's never even passed a bill, a standalone bill in the Congress. But of course, those aren't his goals. To be fair, his goal is to just collect $175,000 a year, government healthcare, a nice big fat pension, and just enjoy, essentially, his retirement within the Congress. So, if you got elected to the Congress, that's a two-year term, how long would you plan to stay? I would probably stay somewhere between two and four terms, potentially five. I mean, I would really want to leave at the right time, right? If we had a Republican president, some good legislation was moving, it would not be probably the time I want to jump out. You know, obviously, this is a strong Republican seat, so there's no chance that a Democrat would pick up the seat. Consider one of the more Republican seats of the 20 Republican seats in the state of Florida in our country, 28 seats total, 20 Republican, this is one of the safest Republican, mostly because of how conservative Lake and Sumter counties are. And so, I'd probably want to leave just, you know, after I feel like we've done a good job for a few terms, move on, run for something else. Let's take a quick break here and listen to a Alzheimer's tip from Dr. Craig Curtis. Dr. Curtis, what is the biggest limitation for Alzheimer's research in America? The biggest limitation for Alzheimer's research is our shortage of patients that get involved in clinical research trials. For example, a couple of years ago, a report came out that showed there were approximately 25,000 open positions for patients with Alzheimer's disease to get involved in research, yet only about 7,000 to 8,000 of those positions went filled for the year. So, every year, we run a deficit in the United States in filling these clinical trials, which in turn slows our overall ability to complete the clinical trials. With over 20 years of experience studying brain health, Dr. Curtis' goal is to educate the village's community on how to live a longer, healthier life. To learn more, visit his website, CraigCurtisMD.com or call 352-500-5252 to attend a free seminar. What do you think a younger person like yourself, Ross? Well, what I've found is that, you know, age sometimes can be very relative. I know people in their 60s, 70s, or even 80s who have far more energy than younger people. The truth of the matter about Webster is, yes, he is in his mid-70s, but more importantly, he's just a low-energy guy. I mean, he is just not a go-getter. I think he was probably that way even when he was in his 40s, to a certain extent. He likes to just relax, hang out. He doesn't really believe that this country's in a crisis and that we're at a crossroads and that we need serious action, that the Republican Party should fight as hard as the left wing of the Democrat Party fights. He just thinks the good old boy system of relax, you know, play defense, enjoy life. Everything will work out. There's nothing to do much in the Republican Party, and everything will be just fine and dandy. I think that attitude, it speaks to somebody who's old in spirit. And so I think that's the biggest problem. I'm the opposite, of course. I believe that this country is in a serious crisis, that even good actions from the Republican Party aren't going to be enough to say that we really need complete and total reform of the federal government in order to allow this republic to survive. I think that what the Democrats are doing now is quite literally striking at the foundation of all Western civilization, questioning gender and family and the truth itself, idea of sovereignty, borders. Good and evil just is quite literally on the line here. When you talk about good and evil, can we talk for a second about the situation in Ukraine and Israel? What are your positions there? Well, they're a little divergent for both of those countries. As much as I think that what's happening in Ukraine is absolutely evil and awful and terrible, the truth is I don't believe that the United States can in an effective way play any meaningful role there in helping or protecting Ukraine. I think Ukraine's got just too many problems, and the conflict is sadly not something that we're going to be able to help with, nor should. I think we need to really focus in a pragmatic way on the conflicts that we can solve, and I just don't think Ukraine is one of them. Therefore, I don't believe in giving more money to Ukraine. Israel, on the other hand, I think both parties, I think most people have agreed that Israel is a very strong ally of ours that we need to fully support, and so I support the budget bill that was passed two weeks ago, the spending bill, to give them additional aid. I also stand by the $4 billion that's in our budget already to help Israel because they are our strongest ally in a volatile region in the Middle East that is universally opposed to us other than just a few countries, and so I think we should stand with Israel and continue to support Israel. And Taiwan? And Taiwan is a unique situation. Right now, of course, they're not really asking for anything from us, but they're an important ally, and they are an important ally in every country in the area. We need more allies. Right. No, I'm staunchly opposed to China bullying them, invading them, doing anything like that, but we need to announce that to China and make that part of our policy towards China that we wouldn't want to have a current trade relationship we have with them if they were going to invade Taiwan, something along those lines, and project strength, but we don't know what China's going to do there. They've really not shown their hands, so yeah. Well, sending us a few pandas doesn't make me happy. Yeah, the panda diplomacy days are over. I think we're not going to see much and provide too much good faith in China when they only send pandas, but continue to leave the invasion of Taiwan on the table as a potential policy option. Anthony, if someone wants to support your candidacy, how do they get a hold of your campaign office? Well, the number one thing they could always do is shoot me a text or give me a call directly on my cell phone, 352-455-2928, and also a line to my law firm, and that's my direct cell phone, so they can call me at any time. And of course, if they want to check out the website, it's Sabatini4Congress.com. That's Sabatini4Congress.com spelled out. Of course, we're on every social media platform from Truth and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram at Anthony Sabatini to check out the website more and get involved. We're always looking to bring more volunteers in. We have dozens already out there knocking doors, talking to voters in West Orange, Sumter, and Lake County. And we, of course, want to win more support from the voters in the area. Have you been invited to talk to the Religious Republican Club? Correct, and I've spoken to them a couple of times, some of the different clubs, Trump clubs. Of course, there's quite a few here, so I haven't spoken to them all yet, but that's my goal, and I hope that they invite. Some of them are true conservatives, and they've already rallied behind my campaign, and some are, you know, anti-Donald Trump, and that's what I've heard in some of the clubs, and, you know, they don't really like Trump very much, and so therefore, they don't like me very much. They're more for Webster. So we'll see who those clubs are, too, and, you know, I'd be happy to come speak to them if they'd invite me. Trump certainly has a lot of political problems with these weaponized lawsuits against him. They may or may not have merit. I'm going to go back to one thing you said. You said you wanted to eliminate the Department of Education. Okay, it doesn't have a great value. Are there any other federal departments that you think would have a great value and need substantial reorganization? Actually, you know, all the agencies have lofty titles, but when you look at what they actually do, they do very little. So the Department of Energy, for example, is not necessary. It's not important. It's silly. It's ridiculous. I would dissolve that one, too, and I would take the functions of a national energy policy and just put that in the Department of Interior or somewhere else where it's more fitting because the truth is, like, these agencies were just an excuse to create more government jobs and more concentration of power in the executive and the Congress, and it's just ridiculous. So that's another department that I would sort of stop, but the truth of the matter is, as much as you could close down these agencies, the most important, most significant reforms are within the agencies. So whether you cut the amount of cabinet heads in half and agencies in half doesn't really mean much if you continue to allow them to fester and grow at the rate that they're growing. So we got to slash and cut. You know, you can cut 20%, 30% of DOJ right now just because of so much of the litigation they bring against private businesses is frivolous and silly, and the Department of Environmental Protection. I wouldn't dissolve the entirety of it, but I would probably slash it by half and bring it to a real focus on bad actors versus small businesses who don't do anything wrong, who they just torment. You know, it's absolutely out of control what they do. For anybody that's interested in the subject should read Obama's Enforcer, which is a book about Eric Holder, who's the head of the Department of Justice, and what he did. He inherited the Bush Department of Justice, and within seven or eight years, he had turned an agency that was essentially non-political and focused on the real mission of stopping bad crime, significant crime, into a hyper-partisan agency that looked like it was acting as if it was just the White House, you know, the White House domestic policy agenda. I mean, it was just about moving a political viewpoint and getting political actors that are affiliated with Obama into more powerful positions. It's a fascinating book. How do we get rid of the bad players that were put in place and protected by, or someone is put into a political position that can't be fired? Yeah, so actually, it's interesting. Not only do we have to underline, reform the underlying law that allows so many protections within federal government, but Congress needs to use the Holder Amendment, which means you can quite literally pass a budget that defunds certain positions. Like for example, right now, Mayorkas, Alexander Mayorkas, the DHS secretary who is creating our open policy, open border policy, and he needs to go. You can bring his salary down to zero dollars, so you can effectively fire anybody you want under the current rules of Congress. You just have too many liberal Republicans like Dan Webster that are afraid to do that and don't support, you know, those kinds of significant reforms. So by replacing those lame, do-nothing Republicans with actual assertive, acting Republicans like myself, you'll find that it'll be much easier to have a Congress that will eliminate people in the Congress, in the government. Great. Anthony, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. It's great. Remember, our next episode will be released next Friday at 9 a.m. Should you want to become a major supporter of the show or have questions, please contact us at mike at rothvoice.com. This is a shout-out for supporters Tweek Coleman, Dan Cappellan, Ed Williams, Alvin Stenzel, and major supporter Dr. Craig Curtis at K2 in the Villages. We will be hearing more from Dr. Curtis with short Alzheimer's tips each week. If you know someone who should be on the show, contact us at mike at rothvoice.com. We thank everyone for listening to the show. The content of the show is copyrighted by Rothvoice 2023, all rights reserved.