BUCK: The Democrats are trying an enormous power grab.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: We know this. This has been central, in fact, from the very beginning of this Biden administration. They’ve wanted to make structural changes. They talk about things like statehood for D.C.
CLAY: And for Puerto Rico.
BUCK: Puerto Rico, right. Statehood and they want to eliminate the filibuster. Why do they want to eliminate the filibuster? Because they want to create a legislative steamroller effect where they can get whatever they want. I mean, they want amnesty? Boom, done, 51 votes — or 50 plus Kamala as the vice president as the tiebreaker.
Today Senate Republicans are gonna be blocking the Democrats in the Senate from this election… I love what they call it: Election and Ethics Reform Bill. I was not of the impression that our elections were so polluted and awful that they needed reform in this regard, but when you actually dig down into what has happened here and what’s actually going on with their efforts, you see that on a lot of this, Clay — and I don’t think this will be a surprise to you — they’re lying to people about where the public actually is on things like that voter ID. They’re lying to people about what it will actually mean if you federalize elections at this level. So, it’s important that Republicans hold this line.
CLAY: Not only are they lying, and I don’t really… I understand. There’s always this great topic. You remember Brian Williams and Hillary Clinton? Brian Williams loses his job in the media for lying about being under fire in Bosnia. He said the exact same thing that Hillary Clinton said. She lied about being under fire in Bosnia, too, and they went and they looked at the response and they said, “Well, why did you hold, as a nation, Brian Williams to this standard that you didn’t hold Hillary Clinton to?”
And it’s kind of an antiquated standard back in the day, Buck, but the answer was because people expect politicians to lie. Several years ago, at least there was the hope that if you were a journalist, if you were a media member, that you would be held to the standard of truth. And it’s funny, remember whether the Billy Bush tape came out with the Access Hollywood with Donald Trump.
Billy Bush wasn’t allowed to work the Today show anymore and Donald Trump got elected president. Right? The disconnect sometimes between the way the media and politicians get treated based on similar behavior. So what upsets me is not that politicians lie because I think, unfortunately, most of us have come to the realization that politicians often lie. But that this wouldn’t be a big story, to your point. The data is out of what the American public actually supports when it comes to voting bills.
BUCK: Do you think that politicians lie more than journalists? Because I would argue that journalists are more dishonest now than your standard-issue politician.
CLAY: It’s a good question. I think it used to be that there was more trust in journalists than there was in politicians. I think it is now the case that there is less trust in journalists. There’s not a lot of trust in politicians or journalists. Like, I remember when you look at the professions that people trust in the country, I remember I was for a while, when I was practicing law and then I moved into journalism, I think lawyer and journalist are the two least trusted positions in America right now.
BUCK: And yet there have been lawyer jokes for decades.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: The journo jerks — (chuckles) jerks, jokes, same thing — are just starting now.
CLAY: Right, and also, lawyers recognize that we are hired assassins, right? If you pay a lawyer enough money, his job or her job is to argue your side. That’s why I like not practicing law full time now because I get to look at all the facts and I get to choose which side I want to argue. I didn’t like, necessarily, being a hired gun because you talk to any lawyer out there, you can look at two sides of the case and if you give them five minutes to review it, they’ll be like, “Oh, I’d choose that side.”
BUCK: So I would argue the journalists are in fact very much the same as lawyers in this regard, and that people who work in the media are all takes orders for a side, for a constituency, and that journalism as a profession of neutrality and objectivity has always been a farce in this country. It’s just gotten more apparent now.
CLAY: I think it’s gotten worse in social media era, and that’s an interesting discussion. The difference I would say between lawyers and journalists is, lawyers don’t pretend that they’re doing anything other than advocating for their client. Journalists — I always like to call them “Capital J Journalists,” the people who think they have the most important job in America.
They will argue with you that the sanctity of truth is their only light, when in reality it often isn’t. But this is what a good journalist, I think, should be doing. They should be looking at the data from the country as a whole. This is from Monmouth, right? They do a big poll dealing with this question of whether or not we trust elections.
BUCK: They’re a little liberal, by the way. Monmouth skews left. So we’re all on the same page, Monmouth skews a little liberal.
CLAY: This result is even more fascinating. The question was straightforward: “Do you support or oppose requiring the voters show a photo ID in order to vote?” and 80% support it. That includes, Buck, 91% of Republicans; 87% of independents. Do you know how hard it is to get 87% of independents to agree on anything? The numbers continue: 62% of Democrats, 77% of white voters — and prepare for your jaw to drop — 84% of nonwhite voters, 81% of all voters under $50,000 a year in income.
BUCK: And yet every night when you watch — not that any of you should. But if you watch MSNBC or you watch CNN, you turn on these shows, you read these newspapers, they will tell you (and this is the central narrative) that voter ID is racist. They will say this to you. They’ll say that any effort to impose voter ID… They’ll even… You remember Joe Biden said. I was honestly shocked. I’m rarely shocked, Clay, by how over the top and dishonest Democrats are in political discussions. But when Joe Biden was referring to the Jim Crow of this era —
CLAY: Jim Crow 2.0.
BUCK: Jim Crow 2.0. That felt like, “You guys have gotta to be kidding me, right?”
CLAY: Yes. Yes.
BUCK: This —
CLAY: He called the filibuster Jim Crow 2.0, as well.
BUCK: This is the same level of stupidity as when there were some Democrats — including, unfortunately, the former CIA director — who were comparing, under the Trump administration, the detention centers for migrants coming into the country to the Holocaust.
CLAY: Oh, yeah.
BUCK: It’s a level of —
CLAY: Concentration camps.
CLAY: It’s an absolute, 100% lie. This is also fascinating, Buck. Do you know what you’re required to do to get a vaccine for covid? Bring a photo ID. I got my email. I didn’t get my vaccine. I was signed up to get the one shot, ’cause I told my wife I’d get the shot, get the vaccine and three things happened. One: All the people who were severely in danger had had their right to do it. Two: There was a one-shot.
Three: I didn’t have to wait. I’m impatient. So I had it scheduled. On the day that they pulled the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, I was scheduled to go get the vaccine, right? I got an email from Publix, which is where I was getting it, the local grocery store chain. The email told me, Buck, that in order to get my vaccine I had to bring a photo ID. So we are allowing an argument to be made that it is racist to require a photo ID to vote, but in order to get this Holy Grail vaccine you have to bring a photo ID!
BUCK: The Supreme Court’s already ruled by this, by the way, in the past.
CLAY: How crazy is that?
BUCK: There’s nothing discriminatory or wrong about voter ID, and yet it is one of the most misrepresented topics, and we’re not just talking about this because we’re trying to have some academic discussion.
CLAY: They’re on the Senate floor right now!
BUCK: (chuckling) They’re trying to make so that you have a federal control. Here’s the truth. You want to know what really happens if Democrats were to get their way on this? Republicans are not gonna win another national election for a few years, and maybe forever, because after this goes through, if they were to get… Let’s say they get H.R. 1, which they’re not going to because of Sinema and the filibuster right now.
But let’s just accelerate this a little bit. If they were to get their way, of course you’ve got amnesty down the line, you’ve got all these things the Democrats have been promising they want to do, H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which is… I mean, it does have a kind of Orwellian or even Soviet vibe.
CLAY: It totally does.
BUCK: “Oh, the For the People Act! How could you be against that? It’s the Good People Act!” If they get this, Clay, they have such an advantage. They used covid… Here’s what happened the last election cycle. They used covid as an excuse to force through under emergency circumstances everything that they thought would assist them.
CLAY: That’s right.
BUCK: And I would argue in the case of Pennsylvania — I don’t care the Supreme Court didn’t take it up still in an unconstitutional fashion — expanding the voting parameters and early voting and getting rid of ID requirements, all of this stuff, and now they want to make it permanent. That’s what H.R. 1’s all about, which, by the way, it’s really the Make Democrats a Permanent Majority Act. That’s the purpose of this.
CLAY: And I think we agree — and we talked about this and I’m sure we’re gonna talk about this a lot — Trump wins in a landslide if covid doesn’t happen. The Democrats latched on to covid, what I call, “fear porn” as a way to beat Trump in 2020. We can talk about whether that beating in quotation marks ever actually occurred even with all the parameters that were in place.
But you’re right. They want to give themselves a permanent home-court advantage, for lack of a better way to say it — you talked about it — potentially adding, once they do away go with the filibuster, two seats for Washington, D.C., two seats for Puerto Rico. Also expanding the Supreme Court. I mean, these are monumentally radical ideas.
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