SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL: Twelve months ago, this president said, “Disagreement must not lead to disunion.” Ah, but yesterday he invoked a bloody disunion of the Civil War — the Civil War! — to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared — listen to this — a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors. How profoundly, profoundly unpresidential. Look, I’ve known, liked, and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday.
BUCK: It was so angry. I watched the whole speech this morning. (impression) “It’s got a lot of Joe Biden doin’ this thing, where he sorta gets his eyes real beady and stares at ya like ya just trampled on his petunias in his front yard. He’s mad at ya, and maybe he’s gonna sniff the top of your head like a weirdo.” You realize that Joe Biden isn’t up for this, never was up for this.
But beyond that, he is being used as a tool of people that really are willing to do radical things and create not only a lack of unity but to separate the most extreme polarization of politics in this country by just the whiplash of being for something then against it — in favor of a policy, then shouting down the policy — depending on who’s in power. The filibuster is a perfect example.
We could sit here, Clay and I could do a whole hourlong show — maybe longer — on all the times Democrats whether it’s Schumer or Biden in the past were saying, “Oh, if you get rid of this, it’s going to undermine our democracy! Get rid of the filibuster, undermine or democracy, or even weaken it,” and now Biden explicitly endorsed changing the rules of the Senate to get through the filibuster this one voting right bill.
Yeah, sure, it’s not that there’s somebody with millions of fake ballots showing up like Santa Claus with a big bag full of them and just dropping them (although stuff like that has happened in places), but it’s not on the scale of millions that it has to happen. It can be on the scale of thousands, and it can even be on the scale of hundreds if you look to, say, the Norm Coleman race. Who’s the SNL unfunny comedian who’s a smarmy fellow?
CLAY: Al Franken.
BUCK: Thank you. Al Franken. There were hundreds of votes separating those two, and they were finding votes in the trunks of cars. It got so shady, of course, with Democrats. Whenever it gets shady, you know Democrats are gonna win in an election. And this is what we’re talking about: Trying to make it hard to cheat and easy to vote. Clay, I just say this, not only is vote shouting and being, you know, the tool of left-wing interests that he is now.
He knows that’s his real, right? Whatever the Democrat Party needs this is what he’s done. Look at how dishonest the argument is I’ll give a shout-out to our buddy Matt Walsh of the daily hour for his tweet that points out something so essential. Where are all of these people who have been stopped for voting in these different districts? Where are all these people that have felt the sting of racism area wanted to cast a ballot? Just give me the last 10 years! Where is this even happening. They never give you specifics.
And what is frustrating to me on many levels here — and this just speaking from a historical basis — is they keep trying to make historical analogies that are falling flat in an embarrassing way. Remember when Joe Biden showed up in Philadelphia, Buck, and he said, “This is the most dangerous time in our democracy since the Civil War,” effectively? It’s not true.
Okay, we had an election during the Civil War. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln ran against the guy George Brinton McClellan, who he had put in in charge of the Union Army, and the question at stake was, “Do we continue the war or not?” and, by the way, McClellan was the Democrat who wanted to theoretically allow the South to go off on their own.
We had an election during World War II, and the question was, “Should we continue on the path we are on” in World War II in 1944 or not? So when they have Kamala Harris, Buck, saying this is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 for January 6th when yesterday Joe Biden showed up and said, “If you don’t support this change in the law, you are Jefferson Davis, you are George Wallace, you are an old racist.”
By the way, George Wallace praised Joe Biden and Biden loved the praise that he got historically. So now he’s acting like that’s a bad thing. Our staff tracked down that story which I’m pulling up in front of me right now, surrounding Biden saying like, “Hey, I love this praise from George Wallace.” You don’t even have to go to George Wallace of course. You can focus on Robert Byrd who Biden was all about who was a former member of the KKK.
BUCK: I believe an Exalted Cyclops, not just a member.
BUCK: A senior member of the KKK. He wasn’t a foot soldier. He was one of the ones at the very top — and, Clay, you have that quote about Biden and Wallace?
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Go for it.
CLAY: The quote here is — and in high school from the 1970s — Joseph Biden of Delaware, for example, tells Southerners that “the lower half of his state is culturally part of Dixie.” He “reminds them that former Alabama governor George Wallace praised him as ‘one of the outstanding young politicians of America.'”
BUCK: This is the most classic Joe Biden moment because he has always done exactly what was necessary in the moment for Joe Biden to have maximum political benefit. That is his ideology. It is Bidenism. It is whatever would help Joe Biden. He is a machine politician of the first order. But what you see here with all this stuff over voting rights is brainless slogans and reckless exaggeration are the heart of demagoguery, and they now compromise the core of the Democrat Party.
That’s what you’re hearing. All this stuff about, “Our democracy is at risk, our democracy…” What does that even mean? When you sit back, you think about this, what are they saying, actually? If we don’t have — forget about the slogans. Go beneath it. If we don’t have ballot harvesting — which has been illegal in dozen of states for as long as I’ve been alive and you’ve been alive — our democracy is in peril? They gotta be kidding me.
Because we have a system that actually makes people show ID to cast a vote, our system is in peril? The Supreme Court already looked at that in a case in Indiana and found that is voter ID is, in fact, constitutional — that it’s a compelling state interest and there’s nothing racist about it. But they keep saying this, Clay, because they know that it makes them feel even as stupid as these arguments are…
Look at all the Democrat states that don’t have the things that they say you need or else you’re racist in election. They just want to call everybody else racist. It is their moral compulsion. It is a need that they have to feel morally superior because everybody else is racist.
CLAY: What about the idea that Democrats want you to have a vaccine identity card to go to McDonald’s, but they say it’s racist for you to need an ID to vote? And, by the way, you hit on the Supreme Court. The thing that nobody will take the next step on regardless of whether the filibuster is changed, Buck, is this: The Supreme Court, based on their most recent jurisprudence, is going to shut down as unconstitutional, I believe, whatever they try to pass when it comes to federalizing state and local elections that are not agreed with by the state and local administrations.
Berenson on the RFK Jr. nomination and whether he'd sign up to join him in…
Another day, another Trump cabinet choice that's making Washington heads explode.
When and how did Democrats become the party of conspiracy crackpots?
Clay meets two legends -- Elon Musk and Sylvester Stallone.
Clay and Tammy Bruce discussed Trump's flurry of nominations.