BUCK: The Democrats have a plan. They haven’t been able to get it yet. Kyrsten Sinema, senator from Arizona, seems to be standing in the way, at least for now. Clay is gonna tell you exactly why she’s making that case. But first, Senator Lindsey Graham decides that he needs to call out what he’s seeing here. Play it.
GRAHAM: I like Joe Manchin a lot, but we had the largest turnout in the history of the United States, and states are in charge of voting in America. So I don’t like the idea of taking the power to redistrict away from state legislators. You’re having people move from blue states to red states. Under this proposal, you would have some kind of commission redraw the new districts, and I don’t like that.
I want states where people are moving to have control over how to allocate new congressional seats. So as much as I like Joe Manchin, the answer would be no. In my view, S.R. 1 is the biggest power grab in the history of the country. It mandates ballot harvesting, no voter ID. It does away with the states being able to redistrict when you have population shifts. It’s just a bad idea, and it’s a problem that most Republicans are not going to sign on to. They’re trying to fix a problem most Republicans have a different view of.
BUCK: So Lindsey Graham lays out what this would do, and everyone should know these are enormous changes — top down — from the federal government to the states, and we really want states to actually be running their own election procedures for national elections. This is what the Democrats want. The only reason they can’t get it is they don’t yet have the votes because Kyrsten Sinema says she’s not down with this.
CLAY: Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. And it’s worth mentioning too — me, putting my lawyer hat on here, Buck — if this bill were to pass, we would spend years in litigation over whether this bill is constitutional or not. And we would have all the different circuit courts weighing in. We would have all the district courts. Eventually, the Supreme Court would have to step in and decide this thing.
It’s just a colossal mess. But, fortunately, there are enough sane people who are at least staying committed to some aspect of the idea of the filibuster needing to exist. And I thought that Kyrsten Sinema, who has a piece that went up yesterday in the Washington Post — this follows Joe Manchin writing in a local West Virginia newspaper — basically cutting the legs out from underneath this.
Kyrsten Sinema says, the headline is: “We Have More to Lose Than Gain by Ending the Filibuster,” and it’s a really interesting argument. But in particular, what I thought was most fascinating about it is, she gently, gently calls out her entire party and says — and I’m reading directly from her piece in the Washington Post — “Good-faith arguments have been made both criticizing and defending the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
“I share the belief expressed in 2017 by 31 Senate Democrats opposing elimination of the filibuster — a belief shared by President Biden. While I am confident that several senators in my party still share that belief, the Senate has not held a debate on the matter.” She drops a bombshell there on her own political party.
BUCK: Yeah.
CLAY: We’ll talk about it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: There is the idea that we saw with the judges, right? The Supreme Court, the fact that you change it — and obviously Mitch McConnell, there’s a viral clip where he says to Harry Reid (summarized), “You may regret this day. I think you’re gonna regret this day. You may regret it much sooner than you expect,” and, boom! It ends up happening, obviously, in 2020 that the Democrats changed the rules and then the Republicans are able to come in over the top and Trump gets three Supreme Court justices. But, Buck, the downside here is something we were talking about off air, and I think it’s a pretty cogent argument.
BUCK: Well, this goes to why conservatives get so frustrated even when they have a majority, which we did, at least — total majorities — for the first two years of Trump administration. Democrats, Clay, wield power. They have an idea, they want to pursue it, they go for it. Conservatives, as we were joking around during the break… Conservatives, generally… When I say “conservatives,” by the way, I mean, Republicans now. Now we’re talking about elected officials not the ideology of conservatism. GOP officials, they want to cut taxes.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: The Democrats, when they have a majority, want to change the fundamental structures of government, change the electoral map, create an amnesty for — I know it’s officially 11 million, but ask anybody, as I have, at Border Patrol, and it’s more like — 15 to 20 to 20-plus million illegal immigrants in the country. They want to make sure that they are a permanent majority.
They don’t want this pendulum effect.
They don’t want the back-and-forth.
So that’s why D.C. statehood, Puerto Rico statehood, court packing. These are all things. Supreme Court packing. These are things that we could play clip after clip of Democrats in the past including some today who are saying that they would do these things when back when, they were very clear that this would be destabilizing, this would be harmful, that there should be some rights of a political minority, the constitutional checks and balances.
You know, there’s a line. I think it’s Frank Herbert, Children of Dune. “When you are strong, I ask for freedom, because that is according to your principles. When I am strong, I demand obedience, because that is according to my principles,” and this is the way the Democrats approach politics. When they can get what they want, they go for it.
When they to want to make an argument about balance of powers in the Constitution, it’s not because they actually believe in those things in a principled sense. It’s because they want protection from the very rules that they would implement against on the other side, and that’s why I think the filibuster issue is so interesting now. I do think, Clay, that the Democrats have at least recognized that on the judge side of things that they did have to deal with the consequences of that mushroom cloud from the so-called nuclear option.
CLAY: It is such a fascinating question to me, and that’s why reading Kyrsten Sinema’s editorial — as I just did a little bit from the Washington Post. She points out first the hypocrisy here, right? Thirty-one Senate Democrats opposed ending the filibuster in 2017, including President Biden — then, obviously, not the president.
But what is so fascinating about this is her real argument is something that is ingrained, I think, in many different minds out there in America. What the filibuster maintains and guarantees is that we don’t have massive swings based on who happens to end up in power in any given year. And this ties in, Buck, you were talking about — I think, really sort of interestingly there — the argument that you made about minority and majority rights.
When I was in constitutional law class, I remember my professor, Rebecca Brown, saying, “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner,” which is really kind of an interesting way to think about it. Minority rights matter a great deal in our government. You probably heard this story. It may be apocryphal over time.
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington talking about the senatorial saucer. Have you heard this story where Jefferson would say, “Why did you…?” Washington asks Jefferson, “Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer before drinking?” “To cool it. My throat is not made of brass,” and the argument is the Senate is the cooling mechanism in our country, right?
And it is such a fascinating way to think about it because, if we allow the Senate to be governed by a 50-50 tie-break vote by Kamala Harris in either direction, then that Senate saucer which is supposed to cool the overall heat of the temper in this country, I think, threatens to become much more of a conflagration and make things that much worse and that much more heated. We need a little bit of coolness sometimes in this country, particularly in a social media era.
BUCK: When you look at sweeping legislation, though, in the last two decades, I think, is a good example of this, putting aside foreign policy and wars and stuff for a moment, domestic, sweeping domestic legislation, when Democrats have the option, they go for it.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: When Republicans have the option, the Senate is the place for passions to go and cool off or whatever.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And the truth is that the Democrat Party of today is increasingly embracing a whole bunch of different people call it cultural Marxism and racial Marxism and even sometimes economic Marxism.
CLAY: What I would say is insanity.
BUCK: And as long as that’s the ethos that they have, they believe in — and I’m somebody — and this goes back to the era where I had to deal with the jihadists in the Counterterrorism Center at the CIA. You know, you should take your opponents seriously and at their word, right? You should believe them when they say things. The radical left fringe of Democratic Party is really no longer the fringe. They’re actually the ethos.
CLAY: They’re driving the bus.
CLAY: Well, I think your point is a good one to the call from Florida. There’s a difference between a tax decrease — which may end up getting taken away in four years or two years or whatever else — and a fundamental transformation. Because if, for instance, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico became states, they’re not going to be un-becoming states. Right? Like, you can change a tax rate, which is what they’re trying to do right now, right?
You can change the capital gains rate. You can. That happens all the time throughout history based on who’s in positions of power. But once you give a state senators, you can’t un-ring that bell. And once you decide that you’re gonna have 15 Supreme Court justices if that became the law, you can’t suddenly go in and just say, “Hey, you six Supreme Court justices, you can’t exist anymore.”
There’s a difference between advocating for a belief that you have which may or may not be permanent, which is typically what Republicans are trying to do, and go out there and fundamentally alter the trajectory and transformational nature of our government, which is what would happen if this filibuster did not exist.
BUCK: And you look at what they’ve wanted from the beginning and what Joe Biden, I would note… He went from, you know, grandpa who’s always squinting and acting like he’s about to hug America.
BUCK: He’s sort of wandering around. He’s got the handlers making sure he doesn’t call the wrong people at the press conferences. We know how that goes. We got Joe Biden wandering around during the election and, of course, Trump, they made it sound like he created covid in Mar-a-Lago in a lab or something.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: I mean, it was all his fault.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: That was the approach.
CLAY: And it was racist if you even mentioned China’s responsibility.
BUCK: That’s right, and that then transformed very quickly the Biden messaging transformed after the election to, “Okay, now we actually have the Trojan horse.” You know, the Trojan horse is in the gates of Troy, so to speak. So we can actually allow the progressive stuff to start to come out and see what they can get away with. You mentioned how there are some things you can’t undo.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: You can’t un-ring the bell. I think in some ways, the biggest… You could roll back the For the People Act, theoretically, if you could actually win enough elections to do it, right, to get that majority, which I don’t know if you could do.
CLAY: If it’s legal, even, which I question —
BUCK: Which is a big question as well.
CLAY: — constitutionally if it’s even permissible.
BUCK: It’s the federalization of elections which are supposed to be controlled, as we all know, by the states. But amnesty is, I think, still the single most obvious extension of exactly what you’re talking about. When you give people permanent legal status, the chance of you taking that away is zero. That’s never going away.
And the Democrats recognize that between changing — and look, it’s almost like dealing with… I don’t want to say, “evil geniuses,” ’cause they’re not that smart, but maniacal and somewhat evil strategy here. They see that they only have a certain period here before they’re gonna have to run back to being a little more normal. They gotta put Grandpa Joe out there to make everyone feel like everyone’s gonna be cool before the midterms.
BUCK: So it’s between now and the real midterm cycle kicking in that they’re trying to push and push and push. If they don’t get radical transformation in Year 1, they might have to wait ’til they do a head fake in the midterms.
CLAY: And maybe not even Year 1, Buck, because think about how often… The reason why Democrats have control in the Senate right now is because of the lack of health in Georgia. Right? We had a specializing election because a senator could not fulfill his term. There are a lot of old people in the United States Senate.
Statistically if you look at the data, we saw before years and years ago Jim Jeffords decided to such parties. I don’t necessarily think a Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema is ever gonna switch parties, but there’s a lot of unhealthy people in the United States Senate. There’s a lot of people over the age of 70. So it may not even be until 2022 until we have some sort of health-related condition that could arise, and that’s why so much of this is being pushed to need to happen right now while you have the auspices of the crisis out there.
BUCK: And everything that we’re saying right now about the cooling of the passions in the Senate —
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: — the pressure doesn’t stop, folks, on Manchin or Sinema.
CLAY: Correct.
BUCK: And right now, sure, they’re able to — and I think they like it.
CLAY: Their intention.
CLAY: They’re basically as powerful or more powerful than the president right now.
BUCK: But then think of the amount of pressure — and you and I both know the way. The one thing that Democrats always do so much better than the other side, it drives me insane, is all the inducements. Oh, it’s so sweet to go along with the Democrat machine!
CLAY: You’re a hero.
BUCK: Those book deals are waiting for you.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: Those Netflix consulting deals. Those professorships, board seats. You know, that’s the stuff that people don’t hear about when you talk about some of these senators right now who are holding the line for the filibuster. All it takes is you get a couple breaks in that dam, cracks in the dam, and we got a whole different ballgame all of a sudden.
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