Bernie’s Mad as Hell at Manchin and Sinema for Saving the Filibuster

BUCK: Now, Clay, yesterday we were having our big chat about the filibuster.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And this is something that the Democrats have been talking about for months. You’d think that because you had Manchin and Sinema come out and say, “All right,” but then Manchin gets a little weak in the knees, it seems, over this thing, and now Bernie Sanders is out there telling everybody that it’s time. (impression) “You know, our democracy is at risk and we gotta do this. We gotta do that.”

CLAY: (laughing) That’s pretty solid.

BUCK: “I’m sitting here with this evil capitalist with no mask on named Clay Travis — and I’m telling you, he’s a threat — every day on radio — to democracy,” and here’s Bernie saying that the filibuster is also a threat to democracy. Go ahead.

SANDERS: I’m tired of talking about Mr. Manchin, Ms. Sinema. Uh, you know, we have got to do what we can to bring people together. The American people I think all over this country understand that now is the time to act. And I will also tell you, you know, clearly we are restrained by the fact that we only have 50 Democrats. And to my mind, what this next election is gonna be about is whether the American people want us to have a government that represents all people, that believes in democracy or not. And we need a hell of a lot more Democrats in the Senate than we have right now.

CLAY: What’s so interesting about these comments from Bernie Sanders is there’s the usual fluff — and, by the way, your Bernie Sanders impersonation is almost spot-on. I mean, that is a very good impersonation, I have to say. Bernie sounds like he’s acknowledging that basically the “don’t let a crisis go to waste” argument is effectively given up the ghost here because that’s an argument for 2022. It’s not really an argument for 2021.

That’s what stands out to me about what he’s saying even though he’s trying to not want to talk about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two of his Senate colleagues in the Democratic Party. He’s acknowledging that they don’t have the votes to change the filibuster. And if they don’t have the votes to change the filibuster, then effectively they have to work with Republicans or nothing’s gonna happen. This feels to me like a very defeatist statement by Bernie Sanders.

BUCK: Let me just say that anyone who leans on the phrase a lot in public life “crisis in our democracy” is —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — somebody that you gotta wonder about what they’re saying no matter what the subject matter is. It’s like somebody that’s always putting forward their pronouns when somebody asks. They’re telling you a lot just by using the phrase “crisis in our democracy,” and I think that with Bernie Sanders, obviously there is a degree of him just pushing this issue so that the left-wing base feels like, you know, the revolution is alive and well.

CLAY: He sees us. He feels us.

BUCK: He knows —

CLAY: The resistance is still living!

BUCK: He knows where they are on this issue. But I also think it’s important for everyone to recognize that the very people who are constantly talking about the undermining of our democracy when they don’t get their way — Bernie Sanders is just an example of this — and the undermining of our institutions, are people who want to radically transform our institutions and, therefore, our democracy.

So you add this all together and say, “Hold on a second. They always talked about… For four years under Trump, it was, ‘Oh, our sacred institutions,'” and now they’re trying to dramatically change those very institutions all under this idea that if they don’t get their way, then we’re all under threat. “The insurrection is coming.”

CLAY: And I’m like a lot of people where I feel like we have gotten a big win, even though it’s not being talked about as much by Joe Manchin. I know you’re skeptical they’re gonna stay committed being opposed to the filibuster — and in Kyrsten Sinema because — and you made an argument yesterday — and I think it’s a good one, Buck, where you were saying, “Hey, the seducing of these Democratic politicians is not going to end.”

But once you put it in writing in your local West Virginia newspaper — and, by the way, I think there’s a strong argument that the last statewide Democrat to ever be elected from West Virginia in any of our lives is Joe Manchin, and he knows that, and if he wants to be reelected in 2024, he barely was reelected in 2018, and I think Kyrsten Sinema knows that the state of Arizona in 2020 was an aberration.

And I think she recognizes how much of a balancing act being able to be reelected in John McCain’s home state and a historically strong conservative market is going to be. So I tend to believe that once they put it in writing, they’re not gonna be willing to bend on the filibuster. Do you think that the filibuster is truly done, or do you think that it could still come up that the Democrats find a way to overturn the 60 vote number?

BUCK: I was somebody who back in the Obamacare era, when it was a bit of a consensus position, “They won’t really do this without a single Republican vote,” right? “They won’t go that scorched-earth and hard-core on this issue,” and they did, and they got it through as we all remember to what we agreed on yesterday that Democrats are willing in a way that Republicans are just simply not to go for it.

You know, to make that final push, to pull the trigger, so to speak. The Democrats are willing to make it happen. I think that this is something where they’re gonna try to read the room a bit, read the polls, really, and see, is it enough to merely play the, “Oh, they’re obstructing us” card, and so they’ll back off. The Republicans are obstructing.

So they back off going into the midterms in an effort to keep the House, — which you and I know is gonna be very tough for Democrats this many times around. But they want to try to keep that because they know if you have divided government and a Biden presidency, this guy’s not a leader. This guy’s Mr. Magoo.

CLAY: If Biden is even still there.

BUCK: Right. I mean, if he doesn’t step down. I always tell everyone this, try to get this on the record. The moment that Biden — and who knows when it will be — decides that for personal, health reasons, whatever it may be, he’s gonna step down, everyone who’s currently saying that’s a crazy conspiracy theory will act like, “Oh, of course he’s stepping down! He’s almost 80 years old.” Guys, this is the game that they’re playing all along here.

CLAY: We just saw it happen with covid and the leak from the lab. “Oh, it’s the crazy conspiracy theory! How dare you have that perspective?” As soon as it starts to go into mainstream, Jon Stewart comes out, makes a joke, everyone in the Stephen Colbert audience is rolling over with hysterical laughter at the idea that anyone ever believed that covid didn’t come out of the Wuhan virology lab.

BUCK: I also think there’s a childishness that is running rampant. You have kids and I don’t, so you actually have to deal with children.

CLAY: My wife, by the way, might say that I’m the biggest child in the house if she were sitting in the studio with us right now. But, yes, I have three kids under 13.

BUCK: But there is a childishness at the heart of the Democratic Party with the argument about the filibuster because what they’re really saying is we want to get it our way this time now, because there’s this false urgency. But I would counter with that the kind of transformational things in federalizing national elections should be hard from a legislative perspective.

CLAY: D.C., Puerto Rico, getting four senators should be hard. Adding six Supreme Court justices? That should be a pretty high standard, I think, to meet.

BUCK: And gridlock is just a way of saying balance of powers, working together.

CLAY: People aren’t agreeing to radical change. Gridlock is not a bad thing to me.

BUCK: I think it’s fascinating with all the flip-flopping, and we should bring back that term. Remember when that was basically the end of John Kerry —

CLAY: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: — when he was running for president? You were before it before you were against it?

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: Ant rallies, it was always, “Flip-flop! Flip-flop!”

CLAY: Yeah, yeah.

BUCK: Not quite as fun as “build the wall,” but “flip-flop” had its moment. The Democrat flip-flopping on issues having to do with our institutions of government but also the narrative against Trump was the hashtag resistance.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And it was the hashtag resistance judiciary, legislature, anything anywhere in government where they could — and this was, by the way, people I know well from the previous White House said that it’s just the tip of the iceberg what you’ve heard of, what has been reported about how many people in the federal bureaucracy would just essentially say, “No. Make us.

“Yeah, you’re the president, you’re the head of the executive branch, but we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna take our time.” So there was an intransigence, a kind of internal sabotage. And that was all the hashtag resistance. Now when Republicans use the very system of government that we have in a completely legitimate way to say, “We’re not going along with you,” the Democrats are like, “It’s time for the steamroller! Let’s get that steamroller.”

CLAY: And to her credit in the Washington Post editorial that she put out yesterday that we talked about, Kyrsten Sinema pointed out that 31 Democratic senators including Joe Biden himself had been opposed to doing away with the filibuster in 2017 as a part of the resistance. The thing that they held to most stringently was the idea, “Well, at least you’re gonna need to get 60 votes in order to enact radical transformation,” and it should be hard, Buck. Think about this. If you’re gonna go from nine Supreme Court justices to 15, it should be insanely hard. To add senators in Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico and states, that should be massively hard as well. It shouldn’t be an easy thing to do.

BUCK: And yet we’re told that the false urgency of now dictates that everything we’ve known in the past about government no longer matters. Everything they’ve said. Forget about what we know, everything the Democrats used to say about the balance of powers and how this all works does not matter. For me, there are so many great phrases from the Obama era. There was “leading from behind.” There was “strategic patience.”

CLAY: “You didn’t build that!”

BUCK: You didn’t build that. (chuckles) But if you wanted the really defining — and of course Rahm Emanuel didn’t come up with this. I think you could go back to Sun Tzu.

CLAY: The Art of War.

BUCK: You could go back to ancient Chinese wisdom.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And you could go back and realize that when Rahm Emanuel as the White House chief of staff said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, Democrats would lurch from one crisis to the next, and that’s the pitch. Covid is an opportunity. The debt is an opportunity. The border even for them is an opportunity.