BUCK: It’s rare that we see a story these days about the Biden administration that you say, “Hold on a second. That can’t actually be true.” But this is one of those moments. Given all of the just idiotic decision-making around covid and the economy and countless other areas, we have a Biden administration that is failing in real time before all of our eyes.

So you’d think that we’d be pretty prepared for more bad decision-making from them, but we hear that they’re planning, Clay, to pay $450,000 a person for families that were separated at the border under the Trump administration, the ACLU bringing this lawsuit. The ACLU is working very hard, always, to kick at the load-bearing walls of American civilization.

No interest in free speech. No interest in liberty. They just want to collapse America and rebuild with leftist authoritarians running the show. But we’re actually now, Clay, looking at the possibility of $450,000 a person, a million dollars a family — for illegal aliens who came into the country in violation of our law, did so willingly and knowing exactly what they were doing — more per person than we give to the families of those who die in combat for the United States military abroad. There is a point at which you just wonder: The Biden administration, is it so ideological that it has lost its mind?

CLAY: It’s such a bad idea, Buck. Let’s discuss it. As you just laid out, the raw politics of it is insanely stupid. But we’re talking about Joe Biden already having the worst record at the border in terms of American, independent, Republican, Democrat. Everyone acknowledges that the border is a sieve, that it’s an unmitigated disaster. And, if you thought to yourself, “How could Joe Biden make an already disastrous situation worse?” this might well be the answer.

Because in addition to it just ringing wrong I would say for, frankly, 99% of Americans… I really do believe that when 99% of Americans hear, “Wait a minute. You’re telling me that illegal immigrants who illegally crossed into this country, knowing that they were unwelcome and that they were violating our own law…? When we separated those families, we’re now gonna have to be paying them hundreds of millions of dollars?

“And we’re paying them despite the fact that they broke the law?” And you want to talk all the time about the message that the Biden administration is sending. How, Buck, do you think this kind of payment would be received for anyone who was thinking about trying to cross the border? They are going to be incentivizing as many children as possible, because you know the way the game of telephone works as it spreads down through all of these different refugee camps and all the different people that are illegally in Latin America and want to be in the United States.

They already think of America as a land of milk and honey which, compared to where they are, is accurate, and is one of the driving reasons why they are coming here. But then you add in that they can break the law and potentially become millionaires in our country. We’ve already had in October the worst month basically on record at the border for crossings ever in most of our lives.

And now you’re going to be this incompetent and give even more incentives to anyone considering trying to cross the border to think that they might end up millionaires? It’s so bad. If you were trying, Buck, to come up with the worst thing to do at the border, I think the Biden administration might have come up with it. I think it’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

BUCK: I think it goes beyond incompetence to maliciousness. I think they know what they’re doing. See, this is where we have the big separation at the southern border. It used to be that there was at least a belief that Democrats and Republicans agreed that we should have something of a secure border, that there should be a control over who comes and goes; we should have sovereignty at our international boundaries.

Democrats at least paid lip service to that. They pretended that they cared about that. Increasingly, what we see is that’s obviously not the case. They want it to be a de facto open border. They want as many illegal migrants as possible to come into the United States. They aren’t able to because there are still federal laws on the books to do so across the board.

But they allow all of these massive loopholes and incentives to stay, and they make sure that there’s really no punishment. If there’s no punishment, if there’s no downside of trying to come in the country illegally, you’re gonna have a lot of people who keep trying to come in. They know that. And as long as the incentive structure is what it is under the Biden administration, Clay, we both know the numbers keep getting worse.

But by putting these payments out there, this is just gross politics. It’s meant to be a repudiation of the Trump border-securing efforts, right? This is meant to be, “See? We have to pay these families,” and this is just a decision made by the Biden DOJ. This isn’t like there’s not some fair-minded approach lane. This is Biden’s people saying, “We’re gonna write checks to these families because of all the terrible things Trump administration did to them.”

Because this makes them look like, “Oh, Trump was the evil monster when it comes to the border.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden has set up a situation where you have more people than ever being human trafficked. The cartels are getting richer off this human smuggling than ever. We have fentanyl flooding into the country that is killing people in towns and cities.

If you’re listening to this right now anywhere in America, there are people within a few miles of where you are likely who are taking fentanyl that comes across the U.S.-Mexico border because Border Patrol is overwhelmed and the cartels are richer and more influential than they’ve ever been. This is a disaster, but they won’t stop it because ideologically the Democrat Party has moved to being an open-borders party. They think America deserves this. They think we’re getting what we deserve right now.

CLAY: And that’s why I think as we get closer to 2022 and as we think about 2024, the number one weakness of Joe Biden is, “It’s the border, stupid,” and this perfectly fits, “It’s the border, stupid,” ’cause it’s the border and — guess what? — it’s stupid what they are doing at the border. And the incentive structures! Buck, you hit at what I think is just a jaw-dropping way to convey this. I tweeted it out yesterday.

We are potentially paying illegal immigrants more money than we pay service members who give their lives to this country who are citizens and who are fighting and risking their lives every day for this nation. The idea that that could be possible strikes everyone — Democrat, Republican, independent — as not only an awful choice, but also a pathetic one and an indefensible one.

BUCK: Clay, let’s also remember that what we’re paying these people, what we would be — and when I say “we,” I mean it, ’cause it’s taxpayer money.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It’s what everyone listening —

CLAY: — everybody out there.

BUCK: — we, the American people — are paying to these families of illegal immigrants in the United States who willfully broke U.S. law, who enriched the cartels in the process, who gamed the immigration system, jumped to the front of the line. We’re paying them for psychological trauma. Look, if the U.S. government had taken people into custody and someone had died because of malfeasance, that can’t happen, right? There are some basic expectations we have. We’re paying people because of the trauma of being separated. The U.S. government puts Americans through trauma of separation all the time.

CLAY: Think about what’s going on with January 6.

BUCK: Yeah. What about the families of people that have been held in solitary confinement for six or seven months —

CLAY: For trespassing.

BUCK. — for nonviolent crime. It’s unbelievable what we’re seeing happening here. But, Clay, you said Democrats are opposed to this. I think what you’re talking about are centrist Democrats, persuadable Democrats.

CLAY: Sane. There are sane Democrats.

BUCK: There are some.

CLAY: Some of them. Yes. But when I look at the numbers, Buck, when you look at the numbers on the border, even the most die-hard Democrat right now, Biden is so far underwater. I’ve never seen an American politician, president, who is this far underwater on any single issue, even with his own party his underwater issue.

BUCK: And here’s the problem, though. We’re talking about the numbers and how — and you’re right. I would guess, and I haven’t looked at them recently, maybe only 20 or 30% of Democrats, something like that, think Biden’s dying good job at the border.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: That’s definitely a core group. It’s like, oh, yeah, open borders!

CLAY: Doesn’t matter what Biden does —

BUCK: Doesn’t matter what he does.

CLAY: — 20 or 30% are gonna be like, “Oh, he’s doing an incredible job.”

BUCK: But from an electoral perspective, that’s a total mess. That’s a disaster, unless the whole game here is what we see with the continued efforts to pass the largest amnesty in the history of the United States, and so you don’t care, Clay, right, you don’t care about the 5 or 10% of persuadable Democrats you’re losing over these immigration policies because the plan here is to add 15 or 20 million newly made Americans, so to speak, giving them citizenship through an immigration amnesty, illegal immigration amnesty. That’s what they’re hoping to accomplish.

CLAY: Maybe the real secret of the Joe Biden administration, Buck, is he said he’s gonna bring Americans together. Maybe he’s bringing Americans together in recognizing how awful he is instead of he’s doing a good job, ’cause that’s what he’s managing.

BUCK: You have more faith in these Democrats than I do. A lot of them are like, “Yeah, it’s not my problem, and also, I like the cheap labor.” But we’ll see. At least the right and independents are furious.

CLAY: Overwhelmingly rejecting this.

BUCK: That is the only saving grace politically.