It’s Religion for Nancy: House Passes Massive Spending Bill

CLAY: Nancy Pelosi is exulting. After months of delay, they have passed the Build Back Better bill, and she says, Nancy Pelosi does, it’s fully paid for even though you and I and everyone listening knows even based on CBO estimates that’s a full and complete lie.

PELOSI: Build Back Better is fully paid for. (Applause.) It reduces the deficit and grows the economy. And Build Back Better will not increase inflation, according to the experts, including an array of Nobel Prize winning economists and Moody’s.

CLAY: Also, Buck, Nancy Pelosi said that the $550 billion being spent on climate related issues is a religious thing for her. Listen to this.

PELOSI: About health care for our children, clean air, clean water, it’s about jobs, jobs, jobs, good paying union jobs keep us preeminent in green technologies throughout the world. You’ve heard me say it’s a national security issue. A competition for habitat and resources with drought and rising sea levels, etc., can cause conflict. And of course, a moral obligation for us to hand this planet over to the next generation in a responsible way. For me it’s a religious thing. I believe this is God’s creation and we have moral obligation to be good stewards. But if you don’t share that view you must share the view that we have an obligation to future generation.

BUCK: Can I just say how excited I am that Nancy Pelosi is finally admitting what I’ve been saying about her and the crazy Green New Deal libs for as long as they’ve been running around, which is this is she says, a religious belief. I mean, she said the quiet part out loud in a sense. This is ideologically driven. It’s not about making you wealthier, more prosperous, more free, happier. It’s about saving the planet.

Now, if you live in a $20 million mansion in the San Francisco Bay area and you’re worth 70 or $80 million as Pelosi, I believe, is, something in that neighborhood, you don’t care about the price of gas, you don’t care about the price of inflation, and you certainly don’t care about what the Green New Deal items that are in this spending package will do to the cost of everything around you to the efficiency of everything around you.

And why? Clay, it’s not about what’s best for the people. It’s about what’s best for the planet. Oh, okay. I mean, we don’t use limousine liberal anymore because no one actually drives around in limousines unless you want, like, a throwback where you have to put the window down yourself, you know, use the old school crank to turn the window down. I guess private jet progressive. This is the ultimate. And $500 billion going to Green New Deal nonsense. That is in this House version of the bill.

CLAY: Yeah. And I was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial this morning, Buck, and they did the Congressional Budget Office scoring which proved it wasn’t paid for even under those metrics, but that this bill, because of it’s sunset provision — for people out there who, you know, haven’t really been following this closely, the way Democrats got the cost down to $1.75 trillion or whatever they’re trying to proclaim is by pretending that these costs basically end in 10 years, less than that for some of these provisions. When you actually count them out ahead, the Wall Street Journal says that it’s gonna cost $5 trillion.

And now the big question is gonna be, Buck, is Joe Manchin, maybe Kyrsten Sinema, maybe Hassan up in New Hampshire, maybe Kelly out in Arizona, people who are under legitimate danger of losing reelection in 2022, are they going to stand up to this bill? There’s talk of trying to get it passed officially in the Senate by Christmas.

But I wanted to share this data with you. Joe Manchin right now in West Virginia has a 60% approval rate. Joe Biden has a 32% approval rate. Seventy-eight percent support Manchin on the infrastructure bill, but 74% of West Virginians say Manchin should oppose the president’s Build Back Better plan. So is Manchin going to bend to the will of the Democrats or is he going to be thinking about his future potential reelection in 2024 in West Virginia and do what the vast majority of his constituents want him to do?

BUCK: The ironic part is that he may, by stripping out some of the most egregious — as part of the reconciling of the bills in the Senate — or the two parts of Congress, the House has passed this thing very narrow, by the way, 220 to 213. So, yeah, you know, you should definitely transform the American economy and do something that nobody on the right thinks should be done right now, and a lot of people on the left think shouldn’t be done when you have a whole seven seat majority in the House and not even a one-seat majority in the Senate, that it seems like a logical place to decide to change the American economy and the way of life with it.

But, Clay, I have to say I think that the Senate version of this is gonna strip out some. We don’t know how much, some of it. That will then be claimed as making it moderate in some way. And maybe Manchin will then go along with it and in doing so, by saving the Democrats from some of the most excessive portions of it, I think he’ll be doing them a favor, because people are gonna start to see as this thing rolls out. You know, who’s read it? Not even the people voting for it have read it.

I mean, you look at some of the Wall Street Journal, some of these analyses, they’re doing budgetary analysis of it, but what does it really mean? And what will it mean for — you guessed it, everybody? Inflation, which, if it keeps going up, will destroy the Biden presidency from a political perspective. They’ll have nothing left. They’ll get wiped out in the midterms. If inflation is really bad Biden won’t even run for reelection. That, actually, I feel very confident in.

CLAY: By the way, Biden is also getting a colonoscopy today, and Kamala Harris is in charge for some small period of time. But I can’t imagine Kamala being the person who’s running. I simultaneously can’t imagine Democrats who accuse everybody of being racist and sexist not nominating her given the fact that she’s the VP.

But really, Buck, I believe it’s on December 9th, the next reading of inflation comes out. And there’s all these economists — you know, economists are pretty worthless in many ways, right, Buck? They’re good at telling you why something happens after it happened, but all of them are expressing shock, many of them, over the fact that inflation has skyrocketed like it has. And it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna go away anytime soon. So I think what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna get that reading in early December, and it’s gonna give Manchin political cover to say we’re not gonna do anything in the early part of this year. We’ll take it in 2022.

BUCK: Turns into almost a continuation of the Manchin effect after that election in Virginia where Glenn Youngkin won, I can assure everybody out there that if you didn’t already know, Manchin after that whole thing went down was in a much strengthened position to push back against the more left-wing members of the Democrat Party who wanted him to go along with it.

I also think it’s interesting, Clay, that Pelosi — look — she gets the whip done, she pulls people together for votes on very progressive, massive spending packages. It’s interesting. She does this, and if you look at history — look what happened the last time Pelosi went along with a huge spending package in the Obama administration no less, heading into those midterms felt like a very different place.

CLAY: She’s gonna retire. This is her swan’s song. I feel like this is the thing she’s leaving, right, it would be stunning if she decides not to retire to me.

BUCK: I feel like they just never want to give it up. The people that are at the levers of power, this is something that you see play out time and again. Look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden, is he gonna be 79 tomorrow I think?

CLAY: Yeah, I think that’s right.

BUCK: 79 years old tomorrow. I mean how many of you have a 79-year-old relative that honestly you would want to put in — now, you may want that relative in charge of the country more than Joe Biden. I’m sorry pretty much all of you have that but how many of you would say, you know what? The best person for the job would be my 79-year-old relative, that person should be president of the United States right now.

And then when you have Kamala Harris stepping in, even just for ceremonial, right, nothing’s gonna happen today, but you could tell everybody goes, “I hope North Korea doesn’t invade.” You know, there’s a little bit of a concern here that if she had to make a real decision, this is not who you would want to be doing that.

So I think there’s legitimate concern there, Pelosi, Build Back Better. I think that, Clay, inflation will be their undoing. We will have to see.