CLAY: Axios reported earlier this morning that Joe Manchin has let the White House know that he is not going to support the $3.5 trillion — anywhere near the $3.5 trillion — that, in fact, he may not support a budget over $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion. Meaning basically the Biden domestic agenda, the Bernie budget, would be dead.

Buck, do you believe him when he says this? Do you think that the $3.5 trillion which we all know actually, if you talk to senators — and, by the way, I think we’re talking to Rand Paul tomorrow, so we’ll ask him what he thinks about this. Do you believe Joe Manchin when he says, “I’m not going to support anywhere near this $3.5 trillion,” it’s more like a trillion or a trillion and a half?

BUCK: I do. And I think there’s a little bit of a motte-and-bailey argument going on here but with a spending twist, right? Where $3.5 trillion of spending is just blowout, remember the Obama stimulus package. Not TARP, which people always conflate, but the stimulus package, was about a trillion dollars. That led to the Tea Party. (laughing)

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And that wasn’t that long ago where people were saying, “Hold on a second! You’re gonna spend another trillion dollars? What’s this gonna do for future generations? What’s this gonna do to the value of our currency and to long-term economic trends that affect all of us in our day-to-day lives?” This $3.5 trillion, Clay? On top of the trillions that were spent in covid emergency and relief funds and all the other things, paying people to stay home and paying businesses.

Remember PPP? We spent so much money. This is just a long way of saying, “Yeah, I think he’s probably willing to stand in the way of the $3.5 trillion and go along with $1 trillion.” It’s still a trillion dollars of spending, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That just goes to show you where we are now as a country, and I think until inflation becomes so obvious and so painful that no one can deny the impact it’s having on their day-to-day lives… Food. Just go into a restaurant these days, you can see things expensive in ways that they can’t hide.

CLAY: Gas.

BUCK: Gas. Right. Home prices have been very interesting certainly in some parts of the country recently, very fast rise. There was a huge surge in lumber where I think it went up about 300%.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: It’s come back down since then a bit. But the point here being, Clay, okay, yeah. How excited can we get about reason and sanity winning the day when Joe Manchin as the 50th vote is saying, “Hey, I’m gonna protect us from the debt bomb by saying it’s a trillion dollars of extra spending on top of the trillions we already spend year in and year out, not 3.5?”

CLAY: Yeah. Here’s the opening sentence, by the way, of the Axios report: “Senator Joe Manchin has privately warned the White House and congressional leaders that he has specific policy concerns with President Biden’s $3.7 trillion social spending dream and he’ll support as little as $1 trillion of it at most he’s open to supporting $1.5 trillion, sources familiar with the discussion say.”

Some people out there may be saying, why do you care about Joe Manchin, West Virginia senator? Remember, they’re trying to pass this through budget reconciliation, which means they have to get every Democratic vote and Kamala Harris would have to break the tie. So if you have one senator who is saying, “I’m not in support of this,” then it all goes up in smoke.

And remember we’ve already had Kyrsten Sinema come out basically and say that she doesn’t support it, either, meaning the Democrats don’t have the votes — at least publicly, based on Sinema and Manchin — based on what they’re saying. Now, whether or not you believe ’em, that’s the next question.

BUCK: Right. As we all know, there’s gonna be a lot of horse trading behind the scenes, a lot of pressure brought to bear. Democrats have a whole lot of ways to induce people, to reward people, and to pressure them. Just as an aside, Clay, our favorite former governor of New York now. The attorney general, Letitia James, are looking into the $5 million book deal he got.

You and I are both in the media business. You don’t get $5 million book deals. I mean, that’s like former president who’s a Democrat memoir level money. But there’s a lot of ways… I’m just bringing that up, because there’s a lot of ways that they can try to either turn the screws or offer you some sweeteners to get you to go their way. But for Manchin, he’s in that special position where he could play spoiler on this. He’s, in some ways, the most powerful senator in America right now.

CLAY: He might be the most powerful politician in America right now when you consider what Joe Biden’s actually got.